SysPro: Reproducing System-level Concurrency Bugs from Bug Reports

TL;DR

SysPro is a novel approach that automatically extracts system call information from bug reports and uses it to reproduce complex concurrency bugs, improving bug localization and reproduction efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a method to automatically extract system call details from natural language bug reports and reproduce bugs through dynamic source code instrumentation.

Findings

Effective at localizing concurrency bugs

Able to reproduce bugs accurately from reports

Demonstrates efficiency on real-world benchmarks

Abstract

Reproducing system-level concurrency bugs requires both input data and the precise interleaving order of system calls. This process is challenging because such bugs are non-deterministic, and bug reports often lack the detailed information needed. Additionally, the unstructured nature of reports written in natural language makes it difficult to extract necessary details. Existing tools are inadequate to reproduce these bugs due to their inability to manage the specific interleaving at the system call level. To address these challenges, we propose SysPro, a novel approach that automatically extracts relevant system call names from bug reports and identifies their locations in the source code. It generates input data by utilizing information retrieval, regular expression matching, and the category-partition method. This extracted input and interleaving data are then used to reproduce bugs through dynamic source code instrumentation. Our empirical study on real-world benchmarks demonstrates that SysPro is both effective and efficient at localizing and reproducing system-level concurrency bugs from bug reports.