Data race, a category of insidious software concurrency bugs, is often challenging and resource-intensive to detect and debug. Existing dynamic race detection tools incur significant execution time and memory overhead while exhibiting high false positives. This paper proposes HMTRace, a novel Armv8.5-A memory tag extension (MTE) based dynamic data race detection framework, emphasizing low compute and memory requirements while maintaining high accuracy and precision. HMTRace supports race detection in userspace OpenMP- and Pthread-based multi-threaded C applications. HMTRace showcases a combined f1-score of 0.86 while incurring a mean execution time overhead of 4.01% and peak memory (RSS) overhead of 54.31%. HMTRace also does not report false positives, asserting all reported races.
@article{arxiv.2404.19139,
title = {HMTRace: Hardware-Assisted Memory-Tagging based Dynamic Data Race Detection},
author = {Jaidev Shastri and Xiaoguang Wang and Basavesh Ammanaghatta Shivakumar and Freek Verbeek and Binoy Ravindran},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19139},
year = {2024}
}