LinuxCon Europe + CloudOpen Europe

Concurrency issues in the software, and data races in particular, may have devastating effects but are often quite hard to reveal. Hunting down such problems is especially important for the Linux kernel, which is inherently concurrent. Although there is a variety of tools to help reveal data races in the user-space code (Helgrind, DRD, ThreadSanitizer, etc.), there are only a few that can be applied to the kernel. In his presentation, Eugene Shatokhin will give an overview of such tools and the techniques they rely upon. Among other things, he will present KernelStrider, a component of KEDR Framework that collects data about the operation of the kernel modules in runtime. The data are then analyzed by an "offline" detector in the user-space to actually reveal the races. The results obtained so far as well as possible directions of future development will also be discussed.