Friday, August 5, 2011

Relacy Race Detector 2.4 and more

Hi,

It's been a long time since I blogged the last time. Since that I had joined Google, and was busy working on the ThreadSanitizer project, which is one the best race detectors out there (not saying that it's free and open source). Also I am actively contributing to the Go language concurrency/scalability related things, and it already starts paying off. The language has built-in support for concurrency and is very nice and simple to say the least of it. But any of that things requires a separate blog post.

OK, I've just uploaded Relacy Race Detector version 2.4, you may download it here.
Features:
+ Support for futex(FUTEX_WAIT/FUTEX_WAKE)
+ Linux/Darwin performance improved (2.5x for Linux, 7x for Darwin)
Fixes:
+ Fixed a bunch of issues with WaitForMultipleObjects()/SignalObjectAndWait()
+ Fixed rare spurious memory leak reports related to test progress reporting


The credit for the release goes to Charles Bloom - check out the blog, you may find a lot of interesting concurrency related stuff there.

The performance improvement is a result of an interesting optimization related to fiber/ucontext switching, and it deserves a separate post:
http://www.1024cores.net/home/lock-free-algorithms/tricks/fibers

Also check out SPAA11 "Location-Based Memory Fences" paper that I co-authored.


P.S. Google office in Moscow is awesome, people and possibilities are even better. Do not hesitate to submit your CV now... and don't forget to indicate me as a referee :)