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International Symposium on Formal Methods

FM 2019: Formal Methods. FM 2019 International Workshops pp 342–357Cite as

Weakening Correctness and Linearizability for Concurrent Objects on Multicore Processors

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12233))

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that there are two fundamental ways of defining correctness of concurrent objects on the weak memory models of multicore processors: we can abstract from concurrent interleaving and weak memory effects at the specification level, or we can abstract from concurrent interleaving only, leaving weak memory effects at the specification level. The first allows us to employ standard linearizability as the correctness criterion; a result proved in earlier work. The second requires a weakening of linearizability. We provide such a weakening and prove it sound and complete with respect to this notion of correctness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this paper, we refer solely to hardware weak memory models of multicore processors, e.g., x86-TSO [19], ARM [13, 20] and IBM POWER [22], and not software weak memory models that allow for compiler optimisations, e.g., C11 [3].

  2. 2.

    This is no longer true for the latest version of ARMv8 [20].

  3. 3.

    Since there is at most one pending invocation per thread, such an \(h'\) will be in the prefix-closed set .

  4. 4.

    A control fence (ctrl_isync in ARM and denoted cfence in Fig. 1) ensures that all branch instructions occurring before it take effect before any loads, i.e., reads of global variables, occurring after it.

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Acknowledgement

Thanks to Kirsten Winter for fruitful discussions on this topic. This work was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP160102457.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Graeme Smith

  2. School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Lindsay Groves

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  1. Graeme Smith
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  2. Lindsay Groves
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Correspondence to Graeme Smith .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Emil Sekerinski

  2. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Nelma Moreira

  3. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    José N. Oliveira

  4. Argo Ai, Munich, Germany

    Daniel Ratiu

  5. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Riccardo Guidotti

  6. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Marie Farrell

  7. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Matt Luckcuck

  8. University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Diego Marmsoler

  9. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    José Campos

  10. University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Troy Astarte

  11. Claude Bernard University, Lyon, France

    Laure Gonnord

  12. Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan

    Antonio Cerone

  13. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Luis Couto

  14. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Brijesh Dongol

  15. University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Martin Kutrib

  16. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Pedro Monteiro

  17. Airbus Operations S.A.S., Toulouse, France

    David Delmas

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Smith, G., Groves, L. (2020). Weakening Correctness and Linearizability for Concurrent Objects on Multicore Processors. In: Sekerinski, E., et al. Formal Methods. FM 2019 International Workshops. FM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12233. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54997-8_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54997-8_22

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