CHESS

A deterministic solution for finding Heisenbugs? Is this too good to be true? Looking around in the Internet for 15 minutes and I could not find another debugging solution that claims to provide exhaustive test coverage of all possible interleavings of a multi-threaded program and still be able to reproduce a discovered Heisenbug. Given that it was produced my Microsoft researchers, it only works for the Win32, .NET, and Singularity frameworks because CHESS relies on understanding the semantics of the program in order to produce preemption points for possible interleavings. So a Java implementation of CHESS would need to understand Java's semantic so that it can put preemption points whenever it make calls to the thread libraries or makes system calls. Though they wouldn't release the source code for CHESS, I don't see why someone can't reproduce this in Java using the same ideas. Would it be considered "stealing" the ideas from Microsoft? I wonder if Microsoft will market this to lure more developers to use .NET.

At first, I was skeptical about how they could possibly cover all scenarios but they relied on several heuristics to minimize the # of possible interleavings. They limited the areas where preemption can occur to synchronization points and at instructions that participate in data races.