Automated bug detection for pointers and memory accesses in High-Level Synthesis compilers

Modern High-Level Synthesis (HLS) compilers aggressively optimize memory architectures. Bugs involving memory accesses are hard to detect, especially if they are inserted in the compilation process. We present an approach to isolate automatically memory bugs introduced by HLS tools, without user interaction, using only the original high-level specification. This is possible by tracing memory accesses in software (SW) and hardware (HW) executions on a given input dataset. The execution traces are compared performing a context-aware HW/SW address translation, leveraging alias-analysis, HLS memory allocation information and SW memory debugging practices. No restrictions are imposed on memory optimizations. We show results on the relevance of the problem, the coverage, the detected bugs. We also show that the approach can be adapted to different commercial and academic HLS tools.