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Portability Analysis for Weak Memory Models porthos: One Tool for all Models

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Static Analysis (SAS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10422))

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Abstract

We present porthos, the first tool that discovers porting bugs in performance-critical code. porthos takes as input a program and the memory models of the source architecture for which the program has been developed and the target model to which it is ported. If the code is not portable, porthos finds a bug in the form of an unexpected execution — an execution that is consistent with the target but inconsistent with the source memory model. Technically, porthos implements a bounded model checking method that reduces the portability analysis problem to satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). There are two main problems in the reduction that we present novel and efficient solutions for. First, the formulation of the portability problem contains a quantifier alternation (consistent + inconsistent). We introduce a formula that encodes both in a single existential query. Second, the supported memory models (e.g., Power) contain recursive definitions. We compute the required least fixed point semantics for recursion (a problem that was left open in [48]) efficiently in SMT. Finally we present the first experimental analysis of portability from TSO to Power.

This work was carried out when Hernán Ponce-de-León and Roland Meyer were at Aalto University.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Notice that all memory models considered in [8] and in this paper are common ones.

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Acknowledgements

We thank John Wickerson for his explanations about dead executions, Luc Maranget for several discussions about CAT models, and Egor Derevenetc for providing help with the mutual exclusion benchmarks. This work has been partially developed under contracting of Liebherr Aerospace Lindenberg GmbH and supported by the Academy of Finland project 277522. Florian Furbach was supported by the DFG project R2M2: Robustness against Relaxed Memory Models.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. fortiss GmbH, München, Germany

    Hernán Ponce-de-León

  2. TU Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Florian Furbach

  3. Aalto University and HIIT, Espoo, Finland

    Keijo Heljanko

  4. TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Roland Meyer

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  1. Hernán Ponce-de-León
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  2. Florian Furbach
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  3. Keijo Heljanko
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  4. Roland Meyer
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Correspondence to Hernán Ponce-de-León .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Matematica, University of Padova, Padua, Italy

    Francesco Ranzato

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Ponce-de-León, H., Furbach, F., Heljanko, K., Meyer, R. (2017). Portability Analysis for Weak Memory Models porthos: One Tool for all Models . In: Ranzato, F. (eds) Static Analysis. SAS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10422. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66706-5_15

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