Memory Management Error Detection in Parallel Software using a Simulated Hardware Platform

Abstract: Memory management errors in concurrent software running on multi-core architectures can be difficult and costly to detect and repair. Examples of errors are usage of uninitialized memory, memory leaks, and data corruptions due to unintended overwrites of data that are not owned by the writing entity. If memory management errors could be detected at an early stage, for example when using a simulator before the software has been delivered and integrated in a product, significant savings could be achieved. This thesis investigates and develops methods for detection of usage of uninitialized memory in software that runs on a virtual hardware platform. The virtual hardware platform has models of Ericsson Radio Base Station hardware for baseband processing and digital radio processing. It is a bit-accurate representation of the underlying hardware, with models of processors and peripheral units, and it is used at Ericsson for software development and integration. There are tools available, such as Memcheck (Valgrind), and MemorySanitizer and AddressSanitizer (Clang), for memory management error detection. The features of such tools have been investigated, and memory management error detection algorithms were developed for a given processor’s instruction set. The error detection algorithms were implemented in a virtual platform, and issues and design considerations reflecting the application-specific instruction set architecture of the processor, were taken into account. A prototype implementation of memory error presentation with error locations mapped to the source code of the running program, and presentation of stack traces, was done, using functionality from a debugger. An experiment, using a purpose-built test program, was used to evaluate the error detection capability of the algorithms in the virtual platform, and for comparison with the error detection capability of Memcheck. The virtual platform implementation detects all known errors, except one, in the program and reports them to the user in an appropriate manner. There are false positives reported, mainly due to the limited awareness about the operating system used on the simulated processor