Automatic detection and validation of race conditions in interrupt-driven embedded software

Abstract

Interrupt-driven programs are widely deployed in safety-critical embedded systems to perform hardware and resource dependent data operation tasks. The frequent use of interrupts in these systems can cause race conditions to occur due to interactions between application tasks and interrupt handlers. Numerous program analysis and testing techniques have been proposed to detect races in multithreaded programs. Little work, however, has addressed race condition problems related to hardware interrupts. In this paper, we present SDRacer, an automated framework that can detect and validate race conditions in interrupt-driven embedded software. It uses a combination of static analysis and symbolic execution to generate input data for exercising the potential races. It then employs virtual platforms to dynamically validate these races by forcing the interrupts to occur at the potential racing points. We evaluate SDRacer on nine real-world embedded programs written in C language. The results show that SDRacer can precisely detect race conditions.