SWAT: Assertion-based debugging of concurrency issues at system level

Modern multi- and many-core systems are prone to concurrency-related bugs that surface only at system level. Detecting these bugs might require dealing with low-level hardware (HW) protocols and/or software (SW) inter-task interactions. Virtual platforms (VPs) offer a vehicle to conveniently debug HW/SW functionality, yet developers are mostly limited to manually breakpoint, step and interact with the system. To ease debugging during integration at system level, this paper introduces SWAT, an assertion-based debugging framework that checks and correlates system-wide interactions among HW and SW components. SWAT is used together with VPs to enable detecting HW/SW concurrency bugs with lower effort than traditional manual techniques. Our proposed approach is evaluated on two state-of-the-art platforms running real-world SW stacks.