research-article

Safe and timely updates to multi-threaded programs

Authors:

Iulian Neamtiu,

Michael HicksAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '09: Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

Pages 13 - 24

https://doi.org/10.1145/1542476.1542479

Published: 15 June 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Many dynamic updating systems have been developed that enable a program to be patched while it runs, to fix bugs or add new features. This paper explores techniques for supporting dynamic updates to multi-threaded programs, focusing on the problem of applying an update in a timely fashion while still producing correct behavior. Past work has shown that this tension of safety versus timeliness can be balanced for single-threaded programs. For multi-threaded programs, the task is more difficult because myriad thread interactions complicate understanding the possible program states to which a patch could be applied. Our approach allows the programmer to specify a few program points (e.g., one per thread) at which a patch may be applied, which simplifies reasoning about safety. To improve timeliness, a combination of static analysis and run-time support automatically expands these few points to many more that produce behavior equivalent to the originals. Experiments with thirteen realistic updates to three multi-threaded servers show that we can safely perform a dynamic update within milliseconds when more straightforward alternatives would delay some updates indefinitely.

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https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00103
Karpoff MAmaral JWang KHo RDobry B(2020)PSU: A Framework for Dynamic Software Updates in Multi-threaded C-Language Programs2020 IEEE 32nd International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD)10.1109/SBAC-PAD49847.2020.00040(233-240)Online publication date: Sep-2020
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '09: Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 2009

492 pages

ISBN:9781605583921

DOI:10.1145/1542476

General Chair:
Michael Hind
IBM Research, USA
,
Program Chair:
Amer Diwan
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 44, Issue 6
PLDI '09
June 2009
478 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1543135
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 15 June 2009

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PLDI '09

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PLDI '09: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 15 - 21, 2009

Dublin, Ireland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 406 of 2,067 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

Zhao ZJiang YXu CGu TMa X(2021)Synthesizing Object State Transformers for Dynamic Software Updates2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00103(1111-1122)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00103
Karpoff MAmaral JWang KHo RDobry B(2020)PSU: A Framework for Dynamic Software Updates in Multi-threaded C-Language Programs2020 IEEE 32nd International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD)10.1109/SBAC-PAD49847.2020.00040(233-240)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/SBAC-PAD49847.2020.00040
Reiss SXin QHuang JHuchard MKästner CFraser G(2018)SEEDE: simultaneous execution and editing in a development environmentProceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3238147.3238182(270-281)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3238147.3238182
Ma XGu TSong W(2018)Software Is Not SoftEngineering Trustworthy Software Systems10.1007/978-3-030-02928-9_5(143-175)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02928-9_5
Reiss SXin QRosu GDi Penta MNguyen T(2017)A demonstration of simultaneous execution and editing in a development environmentProceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.5555/3155562.3155674(895-900)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3155562.3155674
Salls CShoshitaishvili YStephens NKruegel CVigna G(2017)PistonProceedings of the 33rd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3134600.3134611(141-153)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3134600.3134611
Cao MZhang MSengupta ABiswas SBond M(2017)Hybridizing and Relaxing Dependence Tracking for Efficient Parallel Runtime SupportACM Transactions on Parallel Computing10.1145/31081384:2(1-42)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3108138
Dwyer M(2017)Improving Timeliness and Visibility in Publishing Software Engineering ResearchIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2017.266391843:3(205-206)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2017.2663918
Giuffrida CIorgulescu CTamburrelli GTanenbaum A(2017)Automating Live Update for Generic Server ProgramsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2016.258406643:3(207-225)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2016.2584066
Chen XBos HGiuffrida C(2017)CodeArmor: Virtualizing the Code Space to Counter Disclosure Attacks2017 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP.2017.17(514-529)Online publication date: Apr-2017
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