The choice of where a thread scheduling algorithm preempts

one thread in order to execute another is essential to reveal concurrency

errors such as atomicity violations, livelocks, and deadlocks. We present

a scheduling strategy called preemption sealing that controls where and

when a scheduler is disabled from preempting threads during program

execution. We demonstrate that this strategy is effective in addressing

two key problems in testing industrial-scale concurrent programs: (1)

tolerating existing errors in order to find more errors, and (2) composi-

tional testing of layered, concurrent systems. We evaluate the effective-

ness of preemption sealing, implemented in the Chess tool, for these two

scenarios on newly released concurrency libraries for Microsoft’s .NET

framework.

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In  Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

Publisher  Springer Verlag
All copyrights reserved by Springer 2007.

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