Abstract
Verification coverage is an important metric in any hardware verification effort. Coverage models are proposed as a set of events the hardware may exhibit, intended to be possible under a test scenario. At the system level, these events each correspond to a visited state or taken transition in a transition system that represents the underlying hardware. A more sophisticated approach is to check that tests exercise specific sequences of events, corresponding to traces through the transition system. However, such trace-based coverage models are inherently expensive to consider in practice, as the number of traces is exponential in trace length. We present a novel framework that combines the approaches of conservative abstraction with rewriting to construct a concise trace-based coverage model of a class of parameterized symmetric systems. First, we leverage both symmetry and rewriting to construct abstractions that can be tailored by users’ defined rewriting. Then, under this abstraction, a coverage model for a larger system can be generated from traces for a smaller system. This coverage model is of tractable size, is tractable to generate, and can be used to identify coverage-holes in large systems. Our experiments on the cache coherence protocol implementation from the multi-billion transistors IBM POWER™ Processor demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of this approach.
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Notes
- 1.
Other systems that focus on different abstractions require their own tailored restrictions and proof of Theorem 1.
- 2.
Recall, \(\tau _n\) is trace rewriting; \(\delta _n\) is trace abstraction; \(\gamma \) is abstract trace rewriting.
- 3.
A cacheline is in state \(\mathbf {M}\) when it is has been modified; \(\mathbf {I}\) when invalidated; \(\mathbf {S}\) when shared; and, \(\mathbf {T}\) when the dirty cacheline is possibly being shared with other nodes while this owner is responsible for servicing requests for sharing the cacheline.
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The authors thank Viresh Paruthi and Jesse Bingham for valuable suggestions that helped with clarity of this paper.
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De Paula, F.M., Haran, A., Bingham, B. (2018). An Efficient Rewriting Framework for Trace Coverage of Symmetric Systems. In: Dutle, A., Muñoz, C., Narkawicz, A. (eds) NASA Formal Methods. NFM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10811. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77935-5_7
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