Abstract
We propose a novel notion of pointer race for concurrent programs manipulating a shared heap. A pointer race is an access to a memory address which was freed, and it is out of the accessor’s control whether or not the cell has been re-allocated. We establish two results. (1) Under the assumption of pointer race freedom, it is sound to verify a program running under explicit memory management as if it was running with garbage collection. (2) Even the requirement of pointer race freedom itself can be verified under the garbage-collected semantics. We then prove analogues of the theorems for a stronger notion of pointer race needed to cope with performance-critical code purposely using racy comparisons and even racy dereferences of pointers. As a practical contribution, we apply our results to optimize a thread-modular analysis under explicit memory management. Our experiments confirm a speed-up of up to two orders of magnitude.
This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation, project 13-37876P, and by the German Science Foundation (DFG), project R2M2.
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The full version is available as technical report [9].
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Haziza, F., Holík, L., Meyer, R., Wolff, S. (2016). Pointer Race Freedom. In: Jobstmann, B., Leino, K. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9583. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49122-5_19
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