Reports

Effective Dynamic Detection of Alias Analysis Errors

Wu, Jingyue; Hu, Gang; Tang, Yang; Yang, Junfeng

Alias analysis is perhaps one of the most crucial and widely used analyses, and has attracted tremendous research efforts over the years. Yet, advanced alias analyses are extremely difficult to get right, and the bugs in these analyses are most likely the reason that they have not been adopted to production compilers. This paper presents NEONGOBY, a system for effectively detecting errors in alias analysis implementations, improving their correctness and hopefully widening their adoption. NEONGOBY works by dynamically observing pointer addresses during the execution of a test program and then checking these addresses against an alias analysis for errors. It is explicitly designed to (1) be agnostic to the alias analysis it checks for maximum applicability and ease of use and (2) detect alias analysis errors that manifest on real-world programs and workloads. It reduces false positives and performance overhead using a practical selection of techniques. Evaluation on three popular alias analyses and real-world programs Apache and MySQL shows that NEONGOBY effectively finds 29 alias analysis bugs with only 2 false positives and reasonable overhead. To enable alias analysis builders to start using NEONGOBY today, we have released it open-source at https://github.com/wujingyue/neongoby, along with our error detection results and proposed patches.

Subjects

Files

More About This Work

Academic Units
Computer Science
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Series
Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, CUCS-003-13
Published Here
April 5, 2013