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Verification of Concurrent Programs on Weak Memory Models

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Book cover Theoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 2016 (ICTAC 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9965))

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Abstract

Modern multi-core processors equipped with weak memory models seemingly reorder instructions (with respect to program order) due to built-in optimizations. For concurrent programs, weak memory models thereby produce interleaved executions which are impossible on sequentially consistent (SC) memory. Verification of concurrent programs consequently needs to take the memory model of the executing processor into account. This, however, makes most standard software verification tools inapplicable.

In this paper, we propose a technique (and present its accompanying tool Weak2SC) for reducing the verification problem for weak memory models to the verification on SC. The reduction proceeds by generating – out of a given program and weak memory model (here, TSO or PSO) – a new program containing all reorderings, thus already exhibiting the additional interleavings on SC. Our technique is compositional in the sense that program generation can be carried out on single processes without ever needing to inspect the state space of the concurrent program. We formally prove compositionality as well as soundness of our technique.

Weak2SC takes standard C programs as input and produces program descriptions which can be fed into automatic model checking tools (like SPIN) as well as into interactive provers (like KIV). Thereby, we allow for a wide range of verification options. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique by evaluating Weak2SC on a number of example programs, ranging from concurrent data structures to software transactional memory algorithms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See T. Lane. Yes, waitlatch is vulnerable to weak-memory-ordering bugs, http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/24241.1312739269@sss.pgh.pa.us, 2011, or D. Dice. A race in LockSupport park() arising from weak memory models, https://blogs.oracle.com/dave/entry/a_race_in_locksupport_park, 2009.

  2. 2.

    This restriction is of course lifted in our implementation.

  3. 3.

    http://www.llvm.org

  4. 4.

    Input to Spin can then be generated from a set of operations.

  5. 5.

    http://www.eclipse.org

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/oleg82upb/lina4wm-tools

  7. 7.

    With the exception of max. 1 auxiliary variable per write in a loop.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Annika Mütze, Monika Wedel and Alexander Hetzer for their help with the implementation of Weak2SC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Informatik, Universität Paderborn, 33098, Paderborn, Germany

    Oleg Travkin & Heike Wehrheim

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  1. Oleg Travkin
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Correspondence to Oleg Travkin or Heike Wehrheim .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Centro de Informática, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

    Augusto Sampaio

  2. Deptartment of Electrical Engineering BL, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Farn Wang

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Travkin, O., Wehrheim, H. (2016). Verification of Concurrent Programs on Weak Memory Models. In: Sampaio, A., Wang, F. (eds) Theoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 2016. ICTAC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9965. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46750-4_1

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