Dynamic Analysis of Multi-threaded Embedded Software to Expose Atomicity Violations

Concurrency bugs are one of the most notorious software bugs and may not be observed easily. Significant work has been done on detection of atomicity violations bugs for high performance systems but there is not much work related to detect these bugs for embedded systems. Although criteria to claim existence of bugs remains same, approach changes a bit for embedded systems. The main focus of this research is to develop a systemic methodology to address the issue from embedded systems perspective. A framework is developed which predicts the access interleaving patterns that may violate atomicity using memory references of shared variables and provides support to force and analyze these patterns for any output change, system fault, or change in execution path.