Recent Progress of Concurrency Bug Detection in Operating System Kernels

Concurrency bug detection is a hot research topic in the area of programming language and software engineering. In recent years, researchers have made great progress in concurrency bug detection of applications. However, as operating system (OS) kernels always have high concurrency, complex synchronization mechanisms, and large scale of source codes, researches on concurrency bug detection of OS kernels are more challenging than applications. To address this issue, researchers have proposed various approaches to detect concurrency bugs in OS kernels. This study first introduces the basic types, detection techniques, and evaluation indicators of concurrency bug detection, and the limitations of existing concurrency bug detection tools in OS kernels are discussed. Then, researches on concurrency bug detection in OS kernels are described from four aspects: Formal verification, static analysis, dynamic analysis, and combination of both static and dynamic analysis. Some typical approaches are comprehensively compared. Finally, the challenges of concurrency bug detection in OS kernels are discussed, and the future research trends in this field are prospected. © Copyright 2021, Institute of Software, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.