Interleaving-Tree Based Fine-Grained Linearizability Fault Localization

Linearizability is an important correctness criterion for concurrent objects. Existing work mainly focuses on linearizability verification of coarse-grained traces with operation invocations and responses only. However, when linearizability is violated, such coarse-grained traces do not provide sufficient information for reasoning about the underlying concurrent program faults. In this paper, we propose a notion of critical data race sequence (CDRS), based on our fine-grained trace model, to characterize concurrent program faults that cause violation of linearizability. We then develop a labeled tree model of interleaved program executions and show how to identify CDRSes and localize concurrent program faults automatically with a specific node-labeling mechanism. We also implemented a prototype tool, FGVT, for real-world Java concurrent programs. Experiments show that our localization technique is effective, i.e., all the CDRSes reported by FGVT indeed reveal the root causes of linearizability faults.