RacerD

Thread safety analysis.

Activate with --racerd.

Supported languages:

• C/C++/ObjC: Yes
• Java: Yes
• C#/.Net: Yes

RacerD finds data races in your C++/Objective C and Java code. This page gives a more in-depth explanation of how the analysis works for Java code, but may be less complete than the Thread Safety Violation bug description page. For information on C++ and Objective C, see the Lock Consistency violation page.

To run the analysis, you can use plain infer (to run RacerD along with other analyses that are run by default) or infer --racerd-only (to run only RacerD).

For example, the command infer --racerd-only -- javac File.java will run RacerD on File.java.

Background

RacerD statically analyzes Java code to detect potential concurrency bugs. This analysis does not attempt to prove the absence of concurrency issues, rather, it searches for a high-confidence class of data races. At the moment RacerD concentrates on race conditions between methods in a class that is itself intended to be thread safe. A race condition occurs when there are two concurrent accesses to a class member variable that are not separated by mutual exclusion, and at least one of the accesses is a write. Mutual exclusion can be ensured by synchronization primitives such as locks, or by knowledge that both accesses occur on the same thread.

Triggering the analysis

RacerD doesn't try to check all code for concurrency issues; it only looks at code that it believes can run in a concurrent context. There are two signals that RacerD looks for: (1) Explicitly annotating a class/method with @ThreadSafe and (2) using a lock via the synchronized keyword. In both cases, RacerD will look for concurrency issues in the code containing the signal and all of its dependencies. In particular, it will report races between any non-private methods of the same class that can perform conflicting accesses. Annotating a class/interface with @ThreadSafe also triggers checking for all of the subclasses of the class/implementations of the interface.

Warnings

Let's take a look at the different types of concurrency issues that RacerD flags. Two of the warning types are data races (Unprotected write and Read/write race), and the third warning type encourages adding @ThreadSafe annotations to interfaces to trigger additional checking.

Unprotected write

RacerD will report an unprotected write when one or more writes can run in parallel without synchronization. These come in two flavors: (1) a self-race (a write-write race that occurs due to a method running in parallel with itself) and (2) two conflicting writes to the same location. Here's an example of the self-race flavor:

@ThreadSafe
public class Dinner {
  private int mTemperature;

  public void makeDinner() {
    boilWater();
  }

  private void boilWater() {
    mTemperature = 100; // unprotected write.
  }
}

The class Dinner will generate the following report on the public method makeDinner():

There may be a Thread Safety Violation: makeDinner() indirectly writes to mTemperature outside of synchronization.

This warning can be fixed by synchronizing the access to mTemperature, making mTemperature volatile, marking makeDinner as @VisibleForTesting, or suppressing the warning by annotating the Dinner class or makeDinner method with @ThreadSafe(enableChecks = false).

Read/Write Race

We sometimes need to protect read accesses as well as writes. Consider the following class with unsynchronized methods.

@ThreadSafe
public class Account {

  int mBalance = 0;

  public void deposit(int amount) {
    if (amount > 0) {
      mBalance += amount;
    }
  }

  public int withdraw(int amount){
    if (amount >= 0 && mBalance - amount >= 0) {
      mBalance -= amount;
      return mBalance;
    } else {
      return 0;
    }
  }
}

If you run the withdraw() method in parallel with itself or with deposit() you can get unexpected results here. For instance, if the stored balance is 11 and you run withdraw(10) in parallel with itself you can get a negative balance. Furthermore, if you synchronize only the write statement mBalance -= amount, then you can still get this bad result. The reason is that there is a read/write race between the boolean condition mBalance - amount >= 0 and the writes. RacerD will duly warn

Read/Write race. Public method int Account.withdraw(int) reads from field Account.mBalance. Potentially races with writes in methods void Account.deposit(int), int Account.withdraw(int)

on the line with this boolean condition.

A solution to the threading problem here is to make both methods synchronized to wrap both read and write accesses, or to use an AtomicInteger for mBalance rather than an ordinary int.

Interface not thread-safe

In the following code, RacerD will report an Interface not thread-safe warning on the call to i.bar():

interface I {
  void bar();
}

@ThreadSafe
class C {
  void foo(I i) {
    i.bar(); // RacerD warns here
  }
}

The way to fix this warning is to add a @ThreadSafe annotation to the interface I, which will enforce the thread-safety of each of the implementations of I.

You might wonder why it's necessary to annotate I -- can't RacerD just look at all the implementations of i at the call site for bar? Although this is a fine idea in principle, it's a bad idea in practice due to a (a) separate compilation and (b) our diff-based deployment model. In the example above, the compiler doesn't have to know about all implementations (or indeed, any implementations) of I at the time it compiles this code, so there's no guarantee that RacerD will know about or be able to check all implementations of I. That's (a). For (b), say that we check that all implementations of I are thread-safe at the time this code is written, but we don't add the annotation. If someone else comes along and adds a new implementation of I that is not thread-safe, RacerD will have no way of knowing that this will cause a potential bug in foo. But if I is annotated, RacerD will enforce that all new implementations of I are thread-safe, and foo will remain bug-free.

Annotations to help RacerD understand your code

Getting started with RacerD doesn't require any annotations at all -- RacerD will look at your usage of locks and figure out what data is not guarded consistently. But increasing the coverage and signal-to-noise ratio may require adding @ThreadSafe annotations along with some of the other annotations described below. Most of annotations described below can be used via the Maven Central package available here.

@ThreadConfined

The intuitive idea of thread-safety is that a class is impervious to concurrency issues for all concurrent contexts, even those that have not been written yet (it is future-proof). RacerD implements this by naively assuming that any method can potentially be called on any thread. You may determine, however, that an object, method, or field is only ever accessed on a single thread during program execution. Annotating such elements with @ThreadConfined informs RacerD of this restriction. Note that a thread-confined method cannot race with itself but it can still race with other methods.

List mCache;

@ThreadConfined(UI)
void prepareCache() {
  // populate the cache
  mCache.add(...);
  // post cache cleanup task to run later
  mUIExecutor.execute(new Runnable() {
    @ThreadConfined(UI)
    public void run() {
      mCache.clear();
    }
  });
}

In this example, both prepareCache and run touch mCache. But there's no possibility of a race between the two methods because both of them will run sequentially on the UI thread. Adding a @ThreadConfined(UI) or @UiThread annotation to these methods will stop it from warning that there is a race on mCache. We could also choose to add a @ThreadConfined annotation to mCache itself.

@Functional

Not all races are bugs; a race can be benign. Consider the following:

@Functional Boolean askNetworkIfShouldShowFeature();

private Boolean mShouldShowFeature;

@ThreadSafe boolean shouldShowFeature() {
  if (mShouldShowFeature == null) {
    mShouldShowFeature = askNetworkIfShouldShowFeature();
  }
  return mShouldShowFeature;
}

This code caches the result of an expensive network call that checks whether the current user should be shown an experimental feature. This code looks racy, and indeed it is: if two threads execute shouldShowFeature() at the same time, one may read mShouldShowFeature at the same time the other is writing it.

However, this is actually a benign race that the programmer intentionally allows for performance reasons. The reason this code is safe is that the programmer knows that askNetworkIfShouldShowFeature() will always return the same value in the same run of the app. Adding synchronization would remove the race, but acquiring/releasing locks and lock contention would potentially slow down every call to shouldShowFeature(). The benign race approach makes every call after the first fast without changing the safety of the code.

RacerD will report a race on this code by default, but adding the @Functional annotation to askNetworkIfShouldShowFeature() informs RacerD that the function is always expected to return the same value. This assumption allows RacerD to understand that this particular code is safe, though it will still (correctly) warn if mShouldShowFeature is read/written elsewhere.

Be sure not to use the @Functional pattern for singleton instantiation, as it's possible the "singleton" can be constructed more than once.

public class MySingleton {
  private static sInstance;

  // Not @Functional
  public MySingleton getInstance() {
    if (sInstance == null) {
      // Different threads may construct their own instances.
      sInstance == new MySingleton();
    }
    return sInstance;
  }
}

@ReturnsOwnership

RacerD does not warn on unprotected writes to owned objects. An object is owned if it has been freshly allocated in the current thread and has not escaped to another thread. RacerDf automatically tracks ownership in most cases, but it needs help with abstract and interface methods that return ownership:

@ThreadSafe
public interface Car {
  @ReturnsOwnership abstract Car buyCar();

  void carsStuff() {
    Car myCar = new Car();
    myCar.wheels = 4; // RacerD won't warn here because it knows myCar is owned
    Car otherCar = buyCar();
    otherCar.wheels = 3; // RacerD would normally warn here, but won't because of the `@ReturnsOwnership` annotation
  }
}

@VisibleForTesting

RacerD reports races between any two non-private methods of a class that may run in a concurrent context. Sometimes, a RacerD report may be false because one of the methods cannot actually be called from outside the current class. One fix is making the method private to enforce this, but this might break unit tests that need to call the method in order to test it. In this case, the @VisibleForTesting annotation will allow RacerD to consider the method as effectively private and will still allow it to be called from the unit test:

@VisibleForTesting void setF() {
  this.f = ...; // RacerD would normally warn here, but @VisibleForTesting will silence the warning
}

synchronized void setFWithLock() {
  setF();
}

Unlike the other annotations shown here, this one lives in Android.

Interprocedural Reasoning

An important feature of RacerD is that it finds races by analyzing not just one file or class, but by looking at memory accesses that occur after going through several procedure calls. It handles this even between classes and between files.

Here is a very basic example

@ThreadSafe
class A{

  void m1(B bb) {
    bb.meth_write();
  }
}

class B{
 Integer x;

 void meth_write() {
   x = 88;
 }

}

Class B is not annotated @ThreadSafe and does not have any locks, so RacerD does not directly look for threading issues there. However, method m1() in class A has a potential self-race, if it is run in parallel with itself and the same argument for each call. RacerD discovers this.

InterProc.java:17: error: THREAD_SAFETY_VIOLATION
  Unprotected write. Non-private method `A.m1` indirectly writes to field `&this.B.x` outside of synchronization.
 Reporting because the current class is annotated `@ThreadSafe`, so we assume that this method can run in
 parallel with other non-private methods in the class (incuding itself).
  15.
  16.     void m1(B bb) {
  17. >     bb.meth_write();
  18.     }
  19.   }

RacerD does this sort of reasoning using what is known as a compositional inteprocedural analysis. There, each method is analyzed independently of its context to produce a summary of the behaviour of the procedure. In this case the summaries for m1()' andmeth()' include information as follows.

Procedure: void A.m1(B)
Accesses: { Unprotected({ 1 }) -> { Write to &bb.B.x at void B.meth_write() at line 17 } }

Procedure: void B.meth_write()
Accesses { Unprotected({ 0 }) -> { Write to &this.B.x at  at line 25 } }

The descriptions here are cryptic and do not include all the information in the summaries, but the main point is that you can use RacerD to look for races in codebases where the mutations done by threads might occur only after a chain of procedure calls.

Context and Selected Related Work

Reasoning about concurrency divides into bug detection and proving absence of bugs. RacerD is on the detection side of reasoning.

The rapid growth in the number of interleavings is problematic for tools that attempt exhaustive exploration. With just 150 instructions for two threads, the number 10^88 of interleavings is more that the estimated number of atoms in the known universe. There has been important work which uses various techniques to attempt to reduce the number of interleavings while still in principle covering all possibilities, but scale is still a challenge. Note that RacerD is not exhaustive: it has false negatives (missed bugs). But in compensation it is fast, and effective (it finds bugs in practice).

Static analysis for concurrency has attracted a lot of attention from researchers, but difficulties with scalability and precision have meant that previous techniques have had little industrial impact. Automatic static race detection itself has seen significant work. The most advanced approaches, exemplified by the Chord tool, often use a whole-program analysis paired with a sophisticated alias analysis, two features we have consciously avoided. Generally speaking, the leading research tools can be more precise, but RacerD is faster and can operate without the whole program: we have opted to go for speed in a way that enables industrial deployment on a large, rapidly changing codebase, while trying to use as simple techniques as possible to cover many (not all) of the patterns covered by slower but precise research tools.

An industrial static analysis tool from Contemplate also targets @ThreadSafe annotations, but limits the amount of inter-procedural reasoning: “This analysis is interprocedural, but to keep the overall analysis scalable, only calls to private and protected methods on the same class are followed”. RacerD does deep, cross-file and cross-class inter-procedural reasoning, and yet still scales; the inter-class capability was one of the first requests from Facebook engineers. A separate blog post looked at 100 recent data race fixes in Infer's deployment in various bug categories, and for data races observed that 53 of them were inter-file (and thus involving multiple classes). See above for an example of RacerD's interprocedural capabilities.

One reaction to the challenge of developing effective static race detectors has been to ask the programmer to do more work to help the analyzer. Examples of this approach include the Clang Thread Safety Analyzer, the typing of locks in Rust, and the use/checking of @GuardedBy annotations in Java including in Google's Error Prone analyzer. When lock annotations are present they make the analyzer's life easier. It is possible to have a very effective race analysis without decreeing that such annotations must be present. This was essential for our deployment, since requiring lock annotations would have been a show stopper for converting many thousands of lines of code to a concurrent context. We believe that this finding should be transportable to new type systems and language designs, as well as to other analyses for existing languages.

Another reaction to difficulties in static race detection has been to instead develop dynamic analyses, automatic testing tools which work by running a program to attempt to find flaws. Google's Thread Sanitizer is a widely used and mature tool in this area, which has been used in production to find many bugs in C-family languages. The Thread Sanitizer authors explicitly call out limitations with static race analyzers as part of their motivation: “It seems unlikely that static detectors will work effectively in our environment: Google’s code is large and complex enough that it would be expensive to add the annotations required by a typical static detector”.

We have worked to limit the annotations that RacerD needs, for reasons similar those expressed by the Thread Sanitizer authors. And we have sought to bring the complementary benefits of static analysis — possibility of cheaper analysis and fast reporting, and ability to analyze code before it is placed in a context to run — to race detection. But we are interested as well in the future in leveraging ideas in the dynamic techniques to improve or add to our analysis for race detection.

Limitations

There are a number of known limitations to the design of the race detector.

• It looks for races involving syntactically identical access paths, and misses races due to aliasing
• It misses races that arise from a locally declared object escaping its scope
• It uses a boolean locks abstraction, and so misses races where two accesses are mistakenly protected by different locks
• It assumes a deep ownership model, which misses races where local objects refer to or contain non-owned objects.
• It avoids reasoning about weak memory and Java's volatile keyword

Most of these limitations are consistent with the design goal of reducing false positives, even if they lead to false negatives. They also allow technical tradeoffs which are different than if we were to favour reduction of false negatives over false positives.

A different kind of limitation concerns the bugs searched for: Data races are the most basic form of concurrency error, but there are many types of concurrency issues out there that RacerD does not check for (but might in the future). Examples include deadlock, atomicity, and check-then-act bugs (shown below). You must look for these bugs yourself!

@ThreadSafe
public class SynchronizedList<T> {
  synchronized boolean isEmpty() { ... }
  synchronized T add(T item) { ... }

// Not thread safe!!!
public class ListUtil<T> {
  public void addIfEmpty(SynchronizedList<T> list, T item) {
    if (list.isEmpty()) {
      // In a race, another thread can add to the list here.
      list.add(item);
    }
  }
}

Finally, using synchronized blindly as a means to fix every unprotected write or read is not always safe. Even with RacerD, finding, understanding, and fixing concurrency issues is difficult. If you would like to learn more about best practices, Java Concurrency in Practice is an excellent resource.

List of Issue Types

The following issue types are reported by this checker:

• GUARDEDBY_VIOLATION
• GUARDEDBY_VIOLATION_NULLSAFE
• INTERFACE_NOT_THREAD_SAFE
• LOCK_CONSISTENCY_VIOLATION
• THREAD_SAFETY_VIOLATION
• THREAD_SAFETY_VIOLATION_NULLSAFE