Checking robustness to weak persistency models

Persistent memory (PM) technologies offer performance close to DRAM with persistence. Persistent memory enables programs to directly modify persistent data through normal load and store instructions bypassing heavyweight OS system calls for persistency. However, these stores are not made immediately made persistent, the developer must manually flush the corresponding cache lines to force the data to be written to persistent memory. While state-of-the-art testing tools can help developers find and fix persistency bugs, prior studies have shown fixing persistency bugs on average takes a couple of weeks for PM developers. The developer has to manually inspect the execution to identify the root cause of the problem. In addition, most of the existing state-of-the-art testing tools require heavy user annotations to detect bugs without visible symptoms such as a segmentation fault.