A fault localization system that precisely pinpoints the root cause of concurrency bugs. The goal of Pinso is to help programmers triage a concurrency bug by analyzing a failed execution and automatically isolate its root causes. It takes advantage of the fact that concurrency bugs are non-deterministic. For a given bug triggering input, there correspond a huge number of legal thread interleavings, many of which tend to produce correct executions. Our observation shows that, correct interleavings tend to manifest much more frequently than the incorrect interleavings for a given bug triggering input, especially in applications that adhere to strict software quality assurance process. Pinso exploits the above observation to isolate the root causes of a failed execution.

Currently, the tool only supports Linux.

Tested Arch: x86_64

Tested OS: Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.4

Ubuntu Desktop 10.10

GNU make version 3.81 or higher.

PIN binary instrumentation tool, latest version.

Google protobuf tool, version 2.4.1 or higher.

In general, our tool can test any x86 binary with the following conditions:

1. Should use dynamic linking
2. Preferably use -fno-omit-frame-pointer when compile
3. Preferably use pthread library for threading and synchronization

1. Download and install a) the latest PIN binary instrumentation tool b) the latest Google protobuf tool

2. Set environment variable PIN_HOME and PROTOBUF_HOME accordingly

3. Make the package

   $ make compiletype=debug (To build the debug version)

   $ make compiletype=release (To build the release version. Slow assertions are removed.)