We study the problem of finding liveness violations in real-world
\nasynchronous distributed systems. Unlike a safety property, which
\nasserts that certain bad states should never occur during execution, a
\nliveness property states that a program should not remain in a bad
\nstate for an infinitely long period of time. Checking for liveness
\nviolations is an essential testing activity to ensure that a system
\nwill always make progress in production.<\/p>\n
The violation of a liveness property can be demonstrated by a finite
\nexecution where the same system state repeats twice (known as
\nlasso). However, this requires the ability to capture the state
\nprecisely, which is arguably impossible in real-world systems. For
\nthis reason, previous approaches have instead relied on demonstrating
\na long execution where the system remains in a bad state. However,
\nthis hampers debugging because the produced trace can be very long,
\nmaking it hard to understand.<\/p>\n
Our work aims to find liveness violations in real-world systems while
\nstill producing lassos as a bug witness. Our technique relies only on
\npartially caching the system state, which is feasible to achieve
\nefficiently in practice. To make up for imprecision in caching, we use
\nretries: a potential lasso, where the same partial state repeats
\ntwice, is replayed multiple times to gain certainty that the execution
\nis indeed stuck in a bad state.<\/p>\n
We have implemented our technique in the P# programming language and
\nevaluated it on real production systems and several challenging
\nacademic benchmarks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We study the problem of finding liveness violations in real-world asynchronous distributed systems. Unlike a safety property, which asserts that certain bad states should never occur during execution, a liveness property states that a program should not remain in a bad state for an infinitely long period of time. Checking for liveness violations is an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13560],"msr-publication-type":[193718],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-418130","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2017-07-31","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"MSR-TR-2017-37","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"418517","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","title":"liveness-tr","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/liveness-tr.pdf","id":418517,"label_id":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Rashmi Mudduluru","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"pdeligia","user_id":36200,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=pdeligia"},{"type":"text","value":"Ankush Desai","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"akashl","user_id":30905,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=akashl"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"qadeer","user_id":33294,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=qadeer"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[],"msr_project":[615984,239342],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"techreport","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/418130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/418130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418520,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/418130\/revisions\/418520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-content-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-content-type?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-product-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-product-type?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-platform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-platform?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-download-source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-download-source?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=418130"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=418130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}