Automated detection of atomicity violations in large-scale systems

Abstract: Atomicity violations in interrupt-driven programs pose a significant threat to software safety in critical systems. These violations occur when the execution sequence of operations on shared resources is disrupted by asynchronous interrupts. Detecting atomicity violations is challenging due to the vast program state space, application-level code dependencies, and complex domain-specific knowledge. We propose Clover, a hybrid framework that integrates static analysis with LLM agents to detect atomicity violations in real-world programs. Clover first performs static analysis to extract critical code snippets and operation information. It then initiates a multi-agent process, where the expert agent leverages domain-specific knowledge to detect atomicity violations, which are subsequently validated by the judge agent. Evaluations on RaceBench 2.1, SV-COMP, and RWIP demonstrate that Clover achieves a precision/recall of 92.3%/86.6%, outperforming existing approaches by 27.4-118.2% on F1-score.