C4: The C Compiler Concurrency Checker

Abstract

The correct compilation of atomic-action concurrency is vital now that multicore processors are ubiquitous. Despite much recent work on automated compiler testing, little existing tooling can test how real-world compilers handle compilation of atomic-action code. We demonstrate C4, a tool for exploring the concurrency behaviour of real-world C compilers such as GCC and LLVM. C4 automates a workflow based on generating, fuzzing, and executing litmus tests. So far, C4 has found two new control-flow bugs in GCC and IBM XL, and reproduced two historic concurrency bugs in GCC 4.