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The compilation scheme for Volatile accesses in the OpenJDK 9 HotSpot Java Virtual Machine has a major problem that persists despite a recent bug report and a long discussion. One of the suggested fixes is to let Java compile Volatile accesses in the same way as C/C++11. However, we show that this approach is invalid for Java. Indeed, we show a set of optimizations that is valid for C/C++11 but invalid for Java, while the compilation scheme is similar. We prove the correctness of the compilation scheme to Power and x86 and a suite of valid optimizations in Java. Our proofs are based on a language model that we validate by proving key properties such as the DRF-SC theorem and by running litmus tests via our implementation of Java in Herd7.
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Logical bytecode reduction
Reducing a failure-inducing input to a smaller one is challenging for input with internal dependencies because most sub-inputs are invalid. Kalhauge and Palsberg made progress on this problem by mapping the task to a reduction problem for dependency graphs that avoids invalid inputs entirely. Their tool J-Reduce efficiently reduces Java bytecode to 24 percent of its original size, which made it the most effective tool until now. However, the output from their tool is often too large to be helpful in a bug report. In this paper, we show that more fine-grained modeling of dependencies leads to much more reduction. Specifically, we use propositional logic for specifying dependencies and we show how this works for Java bytecode. Once we have a propositional formula that specifies all valid sub-inputs, we run an algorithm that finds a small, valid, failure-inducing input. Our algorithm interleaves runs of the buggy program and calls to a procedure that finds a minimal satisfying assignment. Our experiments show that we can reduce Java bytecode to 4.6 percent of its original size, which is 5.3 times better than the 24.3 percent achieved by J-Reduce. The much smaller output is more suitable for bug reports.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1823360
- PAR ID:
- 10288294
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1003 to 1016
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3453483.3454091
