Ways to Find a Race Condition

Question

I have a bit of code with a race condition in it... I know that it is a race condition because it does not happen consistently, and it seems to happen more often on dual core ma

Answer 1

Indeed there are some attempts to find race conditions automatically.

• Lockset-Based Race Checker
• Happens-Before Race Detection
• Hybrid Race Detection

Another term I read in conjunction with race condition detection is RaceFuzzer, but I was not able to find really useful information about it.

I think this is a relatively yound field of investigation so there are - as far as i know - mainly theoretic papers about this subject. However, try googling one the above keywords, maybe you will find some useful information.

Answer 2

It can be also a resource that is not protected, which can explain non-consistent behaviour (especially if on a single core it's working fine and not on dual core). In any case, code review (for both race conditions and non thread-safe source code) can be the shortest path to the solution.