Testing components for thread safety

Abstract

A checking system is described for determining whether a component is thread safe in the course of interacting with two or threads in a client environment. The checking system uses a manual, automatic, or semi-automatic technique to generate a test. The checking system then defines a set of coarse-grained observations for the test, in which the component is assumed to exhibit linearizability when interacting with threads. The set of coarse-grained observations may include both complete and 'stuck' histories. The checking system then generates a set of fine-grained observations for the tests; here, the checking system makes no assumptions as to the linearizability of the component. The checking system identifies potential linearizability errors as those entries in the set of fine-grained observations that have no counterpart entries in the set of coarse-grained observations. The checking system may rely on a stateless model checking module to perform its functions.