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Trading Space for Simplicity in Stateless Model Checking

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Real Time and Such

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 15230))

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Abstract

Stateless model checking is a fully automatic verification technique for concurrent programs. which checks for safety violations by exploring all possible thread schedulings. It becomes effective when coupled with Dynamic Partial Order Reduction (DPOR), which introduces an equivalence on schedulings and reduces the amount of exploration. DPOR algorithms that are optimal are particularly effective in that they guarantee to explore exactly one execution from each equivalence class. Recently, the authors of this paper presented Parsimonious-OPtimal (POP) DPOR, an optimal DPOR algorithm for analyzing multi-threaded programs under sequential consistency, whose space consumption is polynomial in the worst case. This space consumption bound was realized due to a carefully crafted encoding of so-called sleep sets, a mechanism for preventing redundant exploration. This encoding brings some conceptual complexity to POP, which achieves good worst-case performance at the possible expense of worse average-case performance. In this paper, we present a simpler technique for managing sleep sets, which has exponential worst-case space consumption but better average-case performance. We experimentally compare these two sleep set management schemes on a range of benchmarks. The experimental results confirm that a simpler sleep set is a better choice when designing DPOR algorithms as they are faster and have similar memory consumption for average programs.

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Data Availability Statement

We provide an artifact with the implementations of LPOP and EPOP  and all benchmarks we have used for our evaluation in the following URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13225258.

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://i-cav.org/cav-award/.

  2. 2.

    Throughout this paper, we assume that threads are spawned by a main thread, and that all shared variables get initialized to 0, also by the main thread.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. This research was partially funded by research grants from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research through project aSSIsT.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Parosh Aziz Abdulla, Mohamed Faouzi Atig, Sarbojit Das, Bengt Jonsson & Konstantinos Sagonas

  2. National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Konstantinos Sagonas

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  1. Parosh Aziz Abdulla
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  5. Konstantinos Sagonas
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Correspondence to Parosh Aziz Abdulla .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Grenoble Alpes, VERIMAG, Grenoble, France

    Susanne Graf

  2. Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

    Paul Pettersson

  3. TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Abdulla, P.A., Atig, M.F., Das, S., Jonsson, B., Sagonas, K. (2025). Trading Space for Simplicity in Stateless Model Checking. In: Graf, S., Pettersson, P., Steffen, B. (eds) Real Time and Such. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15230. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73751-0_8

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