Announcing Jinx 1.0: Uncover Hard-to-Find Concurrency Bugs in Windows and Linux Applications - Monday, August 23, 2010
Jinx Uncovers Hard-to-Find Concurrency Bugs in Windows and Linux Applications
Software quality tools from Corensic enable businesses to gain greater confidence in the reliability of their mission-critical applications. Thanks to tools like Jinx, concurrency bugs like atomicity violations, race conditions, and deadlocks are easier to find during software development and testing.
SEATTLE, August 23, 2010 (PRWEB) – Today, Corensic announced general availability of Jinx 1.0, a software quality tool for Linux and Windows that will help developers, testers, and IT organizations improve the reliability of their applications when they are running in a multi-core environment. Multi-core processors enjoy significant usage in enterprise desktops and datacenters, and many software developers are only just beginning to realize the full potential of these powerful processors. But developers still find it challenging to build high quality multi-core applications and avoid concurrency bugs. Such bugs are enormously difficult to prevent, and once introduced, even more difficult to find, sometimes taking large development projects weeks and months to discover and resolve. Jinx makes applications “unlucky” by forcing hard-to-find concurrency bugs to occur more frequently and then pointing out the location of the bugs to software developers. With Jinx, organizations can ship software faster and at significantly less cost.
Jinx 1.0 improves on previous beta releases by offering support for Java-based applications and Microsoft .NET-based applications. Jinx identifies concurrency bugs in managed code and forces them to manifest more quickly. In addition, Jinx 1.0 includes improved bug-finding capabilities for Linux and Microsoft Windows-based native code applications, enabling developers building gaming, media rendering, financial services, health care, and other high-performance applications to more safely exploit the full power of multi-core processors.
“Even as the industry makes multi-core processors more prevalent and parallel software easier to build, the number and severity of concurrency bugs continues to rise. With Jinx, developers and QA professionals have an excellent safety net to ensure that they can ship reliable software,“ said Tom Phillips, CEO of Corensic.
In independent testing, Jinx was able to find concurrency bugs in the popular open source MySQL database server approximately 20-30 times faster than with conventional testing. Bugs that used to take an hour or more to manifest themselves in a production environment can now be caught in mere minutes during the development process. When using Jinx, development organizations can find bugs before they deploy software to their customers, thus reducing support costs and minimizing the reputational impact of buggy applications. Testing organizations can find more bugs with fewer resources, increasing overall software quality and testing efficiency. With the reliability and cost benefits of using Jinx, organizations will find that it should be an indispensible component of their quality assurance efforts.
“MDT Infotech is a systems integration provider for leading companies such as Microsoft, Alibaba, and PetroChina. Quality is a hallmark of the work that we do at MDT. By using Jinx, we have been able to find and fix concurrency errors typically 20 times more quickly than with manual testing,” said Henry Wang, CEO of MDT Infotech Ltd.
“With Jinx, Corensic is addressing a key challenge in the embedded market. Multi-threaded, parallelized applications are proliferating in the next generation of connected consumer devices, and the industry is faced with the difficult task of debugging those applications. As MIPS Technologies’ multi-threaded, multi-core processors gain increasing traction in new generations of mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other devices, we are committed to supporting our customers’ development and debug requirements. We are pleased that Corensic is stepping in to address this critical requirement,” said Art Swift, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, MIPS Technologies, Inc.
Corensic, Inc. is a software quality tools company based in Seattle, WA and funded by Madrona Ventures and WRF Capital. Corensic’s mission is to fuel the multi-core revolution by enabling software developers and software development organizations to build higher quality software. With top scientists, executives, and advisors whose background includes work at Google, Microsoft, Citrix, Isilon, nVidia, and the University of Washington, Corensic combines decades of expertise in designing and testing enterprise-grade software and tools with deep knowledge of multi-core hardware and software.
Website: www.corensic.com
Follow us on Twitter: @Corensic
Find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/corensic
Press Inquiries: Prashant Sridharan, prashantNOSPAM@corensic.com
Jinx Beta 2 Now Available - Thursday, July 01, 2010
Jinx Helps Software Development Organizations Build Higher Quality Applications
Corensic, a Seattle-based Startup, Delivers Software Quality Tools That Detect and Rescue Windows and Linux Applications From Catastrophic Concurrency Bugs.
Seattle, WA (PRWEB) July 1, 2010 -- Today, Corensic (www.corensic.com) launched Windows and Linux versions of Jinx, a software quality tool that will help developers, testers, and IT organizations improve the reliability of their applications when they are running in a multi-core environment. Multi-core processors enjoy significant usage in enterprise desktops and datacenters, and many software developers are only just beginning to realize the full potential of these powerful processors. But despite all the power present in these processors, developers still find it challenging to build high quality multi-core applications and avoid concurrency bugs. Such bugs are enormously difficult to find, sometimes taking large development projects weeks and months to discover and resolve.
Jinx makes applications “unlucky” by forcing hard-to-find concurrency bugs to occur more frequently and then pointing out the location of the bugs to software developers. Some customers report that software testing that previously took days or weeks to surface a software defect can now be done in a few minutes. Jinx can be integrated into developers’ existing build and test environments and is designed to improve the debugging experience and increase test coverage for multithreaded software projects. For test organizations, Jinx allows systematic testing to identify the types of software defects that otherwise would slip past testing and be experienced as crashes by customers. Overall, Jinx significantly improves the software development and test process by reducing the amount of time spent hunting for elusive errors in multithreaded applications, enabling organizations to spend more time to focus on building new software functionality that meets customers needs.
Jinx makes your code "unlucky" by finding and pointing out elusive concurrency bugs, such as the one behind the severity of the 2003 Northeastern United States power blackout. Jinx offers several benefits, including:
You can count on Jinx. Developers and testers will gain greater confidence in the quality of their software by positively identifying concurrency bugs in their code. There are no false positives with Jinx. When Jinx finds a bug, developers can be assured that it's a bug.
Jinx works the way you do. Developers can continue to use their existing software development and testing methodologies and tools, including Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Jinx does not require developers to make changes to their code or re-compile their applications. It operates in a manner that is transparent to existing development processes.
Jinx is easy to use and easy to get started. Developers and testers can get started in minutes by downloading the product, installing it, and finding bugs in their code.
“In over 18 years of running large software development projects at Microsoft, the bugs that either caused projects to slip or created enormous customer problems occurred in multi-threaded software. At Corensic, we’re committed to dramatically reducing the amount of time, money, and effort that developers spend on finding and fixing these software quality issues,” said Tom Phillips, CEO of Corensic.
"Jinx is a permanent part of my programming now; it catches even the most unlikely case of threading bug which previously would have slipped through even rigorous testing," said Kelly Brock of Bioware (Electronic Arts).
Jinx is a revolutionary new tool for analyzing software and detecting bugs. Ordinarily, it lies dormant below the operating system. However, when applications register with the debugger to be tested, Jinx takes control of the system and proceeds in two phases: a simulation phase and a replay phase. In the simulation phase, Jinx examines code execution and intelligently selects slices of time to probe deeper for bugs. Within each time slice, Jinx evaluates numerous possibilities for the timing of how various threads within an application interact with one another, and chooses a particular schedule of thread execution that is most likely to cause a bug.
In the replay phase, Jinx then executes the simulation that causes the bug and makes it happen on the actual operating system environment. For native code, Jinx also pinpoints the location where the concurrency bug occurs. Jinx then notifies the developer, either through the IDE or the command line interface. As a result, Jinx makes code “unlucky” by proactively searching for scenarios that will cause it to crash.
“With Jinx, we’re able to intelligently and quickly run hundreds of simulations of multi-threaded applications running on multi-core hardware. We then analyze these simulations and determine which one has the highest probability of causing a bug. From there, we execute the chosen simulation and force the bug to occur and manifest itself in the developer’s environment,” said Mark Oskin, CTO and Founder of Corensic.
Corensic, Inc. is a new software quality tools startup based in Seattle, WA and funded by Madrona Ventures and WRF Capital. Corensic’s mission is to fuel the multi-core revolution by enabling software developers and software development organizations to build higher quality software. With top scientists, executives, and advisors whose background includes work at Google, Microsoft, Citrix, Isilon, nVidia, and the University of Washington, Corensic combines decades of expertise in designing and testing enterprise-grade software and tools with deep knowledge of multi-core hardware and software.
Website: www.corensic.com
Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/corensic
Find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/corensic
Press Inquiries: Prashant Sridharan, prashantNOSPAM@corensic.com