The design and implementation of an ASN.1-C compiler

Abstract syntax notation one (ASN.1) has been widely used in international standard specification: its transfer-syntax, the basic encoding rules (BER), is used as the external data representation. A BER implementation called the ED library is presented. The ED library includes a number of encoding and decoding routines that may be used as primitive functions to compose encoders and decoders for arbitrarily complicated ASN.1 data types. Based on the ED library an ASN.1-C compiler, called CASN1, is designed and implemented to free the protocol implementers from the arduous work of translating protocol-defined data-types and constructing their encoders and decoders. Given an ASN.1 protocol specification, CASN1 automatically translates the input ASN.1 modules into C and generates the BER encoders and decoders for the protocol defined data-types. The CASN1 design principles, user interface, and some example applications are discussed. The performance of the ED library and generated CASN1 code is also measured and discussed     

LeakSpot: detection and diagnosis of memory leaks in JavaScript applications

The migration of application logic to the client side of modern web applications and the use of JavaScript as the main language for client‐side development have made memory leaks in JavaScript an issue for web applications. Client‐side web applications communicate with the server asynchronously, remaining on the same web page during their lifetime. Thus, even minor memory leaks can eventually lead to excessive memory usage, negatively affecting user‐perceived response time and possibly causing page crashes. To detect memory leaks and guide developers in fixing the leaks quickly and easily, this paper introduces LeakSpot, a tool that creates a run‐time heap model by modifying the application code in a browser‐agnostic way to record object allocations, accesses, and references created to objects. LeakSpot reports those allocation sites causing the leaks instead of all the leaky allocation sites. It also identifies the locations in the code where leaked objects are accumulated, for example, the locations where a reference from a data structure is created but forgotten to be removed by the developer. To facilitate debugging and fixing the leaks, for every leaked object, LeakSpot reports all the locations in the code that create a reference to the object. To confirm usefulness and efficacy of LeakSpot experimentally, we have used LeakSpot to find and fix four memory leaks in a JavaScript benchmark suite and in open‐source web applications. LeakSpot is also shown to be effective in pointing out the potential causes of three leaks in large and popular web applications. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Amulet environment: new models for effective user interfacesoftware development

The Amulet user interface development environment makes it easier for programmers to create highly interactive, graphical user interface software for Unix, Windows and the Macintosh. Amulet uses new models for objects, constraints, animation, input, output, commands, and undo. The object system is a prototype instance model in which there is no distinction between classes and instances or between methods and data. The constraint system allows any value of any object to be computed by arbitrary code and supports multiple constraint solvers. Animations can be attached to existing objects with a single line of code. Input from the user is handled by “interactor” objects which support reuse of behavior objects. The output model provides a declarative definition of the graphics and supports automatic refresh. Command objects encapsulate all of the information needed about operations, including support for various ways to undo them. A key feature of the Amulet design is that all graphical objects and behaviors of those objects are explicitly represented at run time, so the system can provide a number of high level built-in functions, including automatic display and editing of objects, and external analysis and control of interfaces. Amulet integrates these capabilities in a flexible and effective manner     

Detecting memory leaks in managed languages with Cork

A memory leak in a managed language occurs when the program inadvertently maintains references to objects that it no longer needs. Memory leaks cause systematic heap growth that degrade performance and can result in program crashes after perhaps days or weeks of execution. Prior approaches for detecting memory leaks rely on heap differencing or detailed object statistics which store state proportional to the number of objects in the heap. These overheads preclude their use on the same processor for deployed long‐running applications. This paper introduces Cork as a tool that accurately identifies heap growth caused by leaks. It is space efficient (adding less than 1% to the heap) and time efficient (adding 2.3% on average to total execution time). We implement this approach of examining and summarizing the class of live objects during garbage collection in a class points‐from graph (CPFG). Each node in the CPFG represents a class and edges between nodes represent references between objects of the specific classes. Cork annotates nodes and edges with the corresponding volume of live objects. Cork identifies growing data structures across multiple collections and computes a class slice to identify leaks for the user. We experiment with two functions for identifying growth and show that Cork is accurate: it identifies systematic heap growth with no false positives in 4 of 15 benchmarks we tested. Cork's slice report enabled us to quickly identify and eliminate growing data structures in large and unfamiliar programs, something their developers had not previously done. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Indigo: user-level support for building distributed shared abstractions

Distributed systems that consist of workstations connected by high performance interconnects offer computational power comparable to moderate size parallel machines. Middleware like distributed shared memory (DSM) or distributed shared objects (DSO) attempts to improve the programmability of such hardware by presenting to application programmers interfaces similar to those offered by shared memory machines. This paper presents the portable Indigo data sharing library which provides a small set of primitives with which arbitrary shared abstractions are easily and efficiently implemented across distributed hardware platforms. Sample shared abstractions implemented with Indigo include DSM as well as fragmented objects, where the object state is split across different machines and where interfragment communications may be customized to application-specific consistency needs. The Indigo library's design and implementation are evaluated on two different target platforms: a workstation cluster and an IBM SP2 machine. As part of this evaluation, a novel DSM system and consistency protocol are implemented and evaluated with several high performance applications. Application performance attained with the DSM system is compared to the performance experienced when utilizing the underlying basic message-passing facilities or when employing Indigo to construct customized fragmented objects implementing the application's shared state. Such experimentation results in insights concerning the efficient implementation of DSM systems (e.g. how to deal with false sharing). It also leads to the conclusion that Indigo provides a sufficiently rich set of abstractions for efficient implementation of the next generation of parallel programming models for high performance machines. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Vmalloc: A General and Efficient Memory Allocator

Despite its popularity, malloc's shortcomings frequently cause programmers to code around it. The new library Vmalloc generalizes malloc to give programmers more control over memory allocation. Vmalloc introduces the idea of organizing memory into separate regions, each with a discipline to get raw memory and a method to manage allocation. Applications can write their own disciplines to manipulate arbitrary type of memory or just to better organize memory in a region by creating new regions out of its memory. The provided set of allocation methods include general purpose allocation, fast special cases and aids for memory debugging or profiling. A compatible malloc interface enables current applications to select allocation methods using environment variables so they can tune for performance or perform other tasks such as profiling memory usage, generating traces of allocation calls or debugging memory errors. A performance study comparing Vmalloc and currently popular malloc implementations shows that Vmalloc is competitive to the best of these allocators. Applications can gain further performance improvement by using the right mixture of regions with different Vmalloc methods.     

C程序内存泄漏智能化检测方法

内存泄漏在采用显式内存管理机制的C语言中是一种常见的代码缺陷,内存泄漏的检测方法目前主要是静态分析与动态检测.动态检测开销大,且高度依赖测试用例;静态分析目前被学术界和工业界广泛应用,但是存在大量误报,需要人工对检测结果进行确认.内存泄漏静态分析的误报通常是由于对指针、分支语句和全局变量分析的不准确性导致的.提出了一种内存泄漏的智能化检测方法,通过使用机器学习算法学习程序特征与内存泄漏之间的相关性,构建机器学习分类器,并应用机器学习分类器进一步提高内存泄漏静态分析的准确性.首先构建机器学习分类器,然后通过静态分析方法构建从内存分配点开始的Sparse Value Flow Graph（SVFG）,并从中提取内存泄漏相关特征,再使用规则和机器学习分类器进行内存泄漏的检测.实验结果显示,该方法在分析指针、分支语句和全局变量时是有效的,能够提高内存泄漏检测的准确性,降低内存泄漏检测结果的误报.最后,对未来研究的可行性以及面临的挑战进行了展望.     

基于LINQ to Entity数据访问技术的应用研究

在应用系统编写的过程中,提高编写数据访问代码的效率及代码的健壮性是程序员追求的重要目标。在Visual Studio 2008中提供的LINQ技术可以帮助程序员实现这两个目标。LINQ的语法类似于SQL,同时可以使用同样的语法结构对数据集对象、关系数据库、XML数据及Entity Framework数据进行操作。     

A new parsing method for non-LR(1) grammars

One of the difficult problems that faces a compiler writer is to devise a grammar that is suitable for both efficient parsing and semantic attribution. This paper describes a system that resolves conflicts in LR(1) parsing by taking advantage of information in the parse tree. The system, which functions as part of a compiler generator, rewrites the user's grammar to remove parsing conflicts. It then places code into the generated compiler that rewrites the parse tree during parsing so as to produce the tree of the original grammar. The compiler writer can then write the semantic attribution to fit his or her original grammar without any knowledge of the changes made. The method is expected to be efficient in most cases, even in parsing systems that do not explicitly build the entire parse tree. The method complements previous work in its capabilities and advantages. The system has been implemented and integrated into a compiler generator system.     

基于LINQ to Entity数据访问技术的应用研究

在应用系统编写的过程中．提高编写数据访问代码的效率及代码的健壮性是程序员追求的重要目标。在VisualStudio2008中提供的LINQ技术可以帮助程序员实现这两个目标。LINQ的语法类似于SQL，同时可以使用同样的语法结构对数据集对象、关系数据库、XML数据及EntityFramework数据进行操作。     

Tuning memory performance of sequential and parallel programs

To improve program memory performance, programmers and compiler writers can transform the application so that its memory-referencing behavior better exploits the memory hierarchy. The challenge in achieving these program transformations is overcoming the difficulty of statically analyzing or reasoning about an application's referencing behavior and interactions. In addition, many performance-monitoring tools collect high-level information that is inadequately detailed to analyze specific memory performance bugs. We describe MemSpy, a performance-monitoring tool we designed to help programmers discern where and why memory bottlenecks occur. MemSpy guides programmers toward program transformations that improve memory performance through detailed statistics on cache-miss causes and frequency. Because of the natural link between data-reference patterns and memory performance, MemSpy helps programmers comprehend data structure and code segment interactions by displaying statistics in terms of both the program's data and code structures, rather than for code structures alone     

KAL: kernel‐assisted non‐invasive memory leak tolerance with a general‐purpose memory allocator

Memory leaks are a continuing problem in the software developed with programming languages, such as C and C++. A recent approach adopted by some researchers is to tolerate leaks in the software application and to reclaim the leaked memory by use of specially constructed memory allocation routines. However, such routines replace the usual general‐purpose memory allocator and tend to be less efficient in speed and in memory utilization. We propose a new scheme which coexists with the existing memory allocation routines and which reclaims memory leaks. Our scheme identifies and reclaims leaked memory at the kernel level. There are some major advantages to our approach: (1) the application software does not need to be modified; (2) the application does not need to be suspended while leaked memory is reclaimed; (3) a remote host can be used to identify the leaked memory, thus minimizing impact on the application program's performance; and (4) our scheme does not degrade the service availability of the application while detecting and reclaiming memory leaks. We have implemented a prototype that works with the GNU C library and with the Linux kernel. Our prototype has been tested and evaluated with various real‐world applications. Our results show that the computational overhead of our approach is around 2% of that incurred by the conventional memory allocator in terms of throughput and average response time. We also verified that the prototype successfully suppressed address space expansion caused by memory leaks when the applications are run on synthetic workloads. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

面向申威异构架构的并行代码自动生成

异构架构逐渐成为高性能计算领域的主流架构,但相较于同构多核架构,其硬件结构及存储层次更为复杂,程序编写更为困难.先进的优化编译器可以协助程序开发人员实现更为高效的代码,降低程序开发复杂度.多面体编译模型通过抽象分析将程序抽象成空间多面体表示形式,能够将多种循环变换与硬件映射相结合,并面向特定体系结构生成相应的代码.设计实现了一个面向国产申威异构架构的并行代码自动生成系统,采用“源-源”编译模式,基于多面体编译模型实现.系统针对申威异构架构特点将程序计算过程进行硬件部署,同时实现数据传输与内存空间的自动管理.实验基于Polybench测试集中线性代数相关用例进行测试.结果表明,利用代码自动生成系统生成的异构并行代码能够在申威异构平台上正确运行,并能够有效发挥申威异构平台的性能,基于申威异构平台利用64线程加速计算的平均加速比达到了539.16倍.     

内存泄漏对象检测与度量方法

程序运行过程中一些不再被使用的对象未及时释放会引发内存泄漏问题,泄漏对象经过长期累积会降低系统性能,甚至导致系统崩溃。针对Java程序中的内存泄漏问题,提出了一种内存泄漏对象检测与度量方法。通过动态跟踪源程序的执行过程,周期性记录堆栈信息,并分析堆中可疑的泄漏对象。定义内存泄漏度计算方法,度量不同对象对程序泄漏的影响程度,从而确定产生泄漏的对象。最后选取两个开源程序进行验证,并与两种现有方法进行对比,结果表明该方法的泄漏检测率较高。     

iWatcher: simple, general architectural support for software debugging

We propose Intelligent Watcher (iWatcher), a combination of hardware and software support that can detect large variations of software bugs with only modest hardware changes to current processor implementations. iWatcher lets programmers associate specified functions to "watched" memory locations or objects. Access to any such location automatically triggers the monitoring function in the hardware. Relative to other approaches, iWatcher detects many real bugs at a fraction of the execution-time overhead     

Practical static analysis of context leaks in Android applications

Android native applications, written in Java and distributed in APK format, are widely used in mobile devices. Their specific pattern of use lets the operating system control the creation and destruction of resources, such as activities and services (contexts). Programmers are not supposed to interfere with such life cycle events. Otherwise, contexts might be leaked, ie, they will never be deallocated from memory, or be deallocated late, leading to memory exhaustion and frozen applications. In practice, it is easy to write incorrect code, which hinders garbage collection of contexts and leads to context leakages. In this work, we present a novel static analysis method that finds context leaks in Android code. We apply this analysis to APKs translated into Java bytecode. We provide a formal analysis of our algorithms and suggest further research directions for improving precision by combining different approaches. We discuss the results of a large number of experiments with our analysis, which reveal context leaks in many widely used applications from the Android marketplace. This shows the practical usefulness of our technique and its superiority w.r.t. the well-known Lint and Infer static analysis tools. We estimate the amount of memory saved by the collection of the leaks found and explain, experimentally, where programmers often go wrong and limitations of our tool. Such lessons could be used for designing of a sound or more powerful static analysis tool. This work can be considered as a practical application of software analysis techniques to solve practical problems.     

Memory leak detection in Plumbr

Platforms with automatic memory management, such as the JVM, are usually considered free of memory leaks. However, memory leaks can happen in such environments, as the garbage collector cannot free objects, which are not used by the application anymore, but are still referenced. Such unused objects can eventually fill up the heap and crash the application. Although this problem has been studied extensively, nevertheless, there are still many rooms for improvement in this area. This paper describes the statistical approach for memory leak detection, as an alternative, along with a commercial tool, Plumbr, which is based on the method. The tool is later analyzed with three case studies of real applications and in the process also analyzes strengths and weaknesses of the statistical approach for memory leak detection. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Design and Implementation of an Extended Collectives Library for Unified Parallel C

Unified Parallel C(UPC) is a parallel extension of ANSI C based on the Partitioned Global Address Space(PGAS) programming model,which provides a shared memory view that simplifies code development while it can take advantage of the scalability of distributed memory architectures.Therefore,UPC allows programmers to write parallel applications on hybrid shared/distributed memory architectures,such as multi-core clusters,in a more productive way,accessing remote memory by means of different high-level language constructs,such as assignments to shared variables or collective primitives.However,the standard UPC collectives library includes a reduced set of eight basic primitives with quite limited functionality.This work presents the design and implementation of extended UPC collective functions that overcome the limitations of the standard collectives library,allowing,for example,the use of a specific source and destination thread or defining the amount of data transferred by each particular thread.This library fulfills the demands made by the UPC developers community and implements portable algorithms,independent of the specific UPC compiler/runtime being used.The use of a representative set of these extended collectives has been evaluated using two applications and four kernels as case studies.The results obtained confirm the suitability of the new library to provide easier programming without trading off performance,thus achieving high productivity in parallel programming to harness the performance of hybrid shared/distributed memory architectures in high performance computing.     

嵌入式软件内存泄露检测方法研究

动态内存分配为C/C++语言编程人员提供了极大的灵活性,但同时也带来了一个潜在的严重问题——内存泄露。与桌面系统相比,嵌入式系统处理能力弱、内存空间小、运行时间长,如果在程序运行期间发生内存泄露,将导致系统崩溃,造成不可预料的后果,因此需要在开发调试阶段尽早检测出造成内存泄露的代码。提出了一种基于动态检测技术和程序插装技术的嵌入式软件内存泄露分布式检测方法。该方法的实现思想是当程序在目标机运行时,插装代码自动截获内存操作函数,收集内存操作相关信息并把收集到的信息发送到服务器端处理,实现了嵌入式系统内存泄露的准确检测。实验结果证明,由于采用分布式技术进行信息处理,内存泄露检测效率得到了很大的提升。