Finding Concurrency Errors in Sequential Code - OS-level, In-vivo Model Checking of Process Races

While thread races have drawn huge attention from the research community, little has been done for process races, where multiple—possibly sequential—processes access a shared resource, such as a file, without proper synchronization. We present a preliminary study of real process races and show that they are numerous, dangerous, and difficult to detect. To address this problem, we present the design of RACEPRO, an in-vivomodel checking system for automatically detecting process races in deployed systems, along with preliminary results from a RACEPRO prototype. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study real process races, and RACEPRO is the first system to detect them.