abstract.tex

Application debugging is a tedious chore in software development cycle. The need of an efficient debugger increases with the complexity of software involving parallel system. Read Copy Update (RCU) is a wait-free synchronization mechanism which gets heavily used in the parallel system to reduce overheads and avoid deadlocks. Being complex in its design, one needs to take a lot of care while using RCU. The incorrect usage of RCU often leads to programming error or bugs. The existing solution for analysing such bugs are imprecise and generate false positive. 

In this project we introduces a new approach for analysing such bugs using \emph{Software Watchpoint}. Our \emph{Watchpoint} mechanism is implemented using Dynamic Binary Instrumentation (DBI) technique and provides efficient infrastructure to enforce memory access policy. We used \emph{Watchpoint} to track and verify the references of RCU protected data. Our system is precise and imposes moderate overhead for reader and low overhead for writer thread. Our system is limited in its approach and identify bugs related to pointer leak in classical RCU.