Automated Concurrency-Bug Fixing

Concurrency bugs are widespread in multithreaded programs. Fixing them is time-consuming and error-prone. The authors present CFix, a system that automates the repair of concurrency bugs. CFix works with a wide variety of concurrency-bug detectors. For each failure-inducing interleaving reported by a bug detector, CFix first determines a combination of mutual-exclusion and order relationships that, once enforced, can prevent the buggy interleaving. CFix then uses static analysis and testing to determine where to insert what synchronization operations to force the desired mutual-exclusion and order relationships, with a best effort to avoid deadlocks and excessive performance losses. CFix also simplifies its own patches by merging fixes for related bugs.