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Proving thread termination

Published: 10 June 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Concurrent programs are often designed such that certain functions executing within critical threads must terminate. Examples of such cases can be found in operating systems, web servers, e-mail clients, etc. Unfortunately, no known automatic program termination prover supports a practical method of proving the termination of threads. In this paper we describe such a procedure. The procedure's scalability is achieved through the use of environment models that abstract away the surrounding threads. The procedure's accuracy is due to a novel method of incrementally constructing environment abstractions. Our method finds the conditions that a thread requires of its environment in order to establish termination by looking at the conditions necessary to prove that certain paths through the thread represent well-founded relations if executed in isolation of the other threads. The paper gives a description of experimental results using an implementation of our procedureon Windows device drivers and adescription of a previously unknown bug found withthe tool.

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  • (2024)Mostly Automated Verification of Liveness Properties for Distributed Protocols with Ranking FunctionsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36328778:POPL(1028-1059)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Regular Abstractions for Array SystemsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36328648:POPL(638-666)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
  • (2023)Thread-modular counter abstraction: automated safety and termination proofs of parameterized software by reduction to sequential program verificationFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-023-00439-6Online publication date: 6-Oct-2023
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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 42, Issue 6
Proceedings of the 2007 PLDI conference
June 2007
491 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1273442
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    PLDI '07: Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
    June 2007
    508 pages
    ISBN:9781595936332
    DOI:10.1145/1250734
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 June 2007
Published in SIGPLAN Volume 42, Issue 6

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Author Tags

  1. concurrency
  2. formal verification
  3. model checking
  4. program verification
  5. termination
  6. threads

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  • (2024)Mostly Automated Verification of Liveness Properties for Distributed Protocols with Ranking FunctionsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36328778:POPL(1028-1059)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Regular Abstractions for Array SystemsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36328648:POPL(638-666)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
  • (2023)Thread-modular counter abstraction: automated safety and termination proofs of parameterized software by reduction to sequential program verificationFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-023-00439-6Online publication date: 6-Oct-2023
  • (2021)TaDA Live: Compositional Reasoning for Termination of Fine-grained Concurrent ProgramsACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/347708243:4(1-134)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2021
  • (2021)Rely-guarantee bound analysis of parameterized concurrent shared-memory programsFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-021-00370-8Online publication date: 6-Apr-2021
  • (2015)Fairness Modulo Theory: A New Approach to LTL Software Model CheckingComputer Aided Verification10.1007/978-3-319-21690-4_4(49-66)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2015
  • (2014)Causal Termination of Multi-threaded ProgramsProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification - Volume 855910.1007/978-3-319-08867-9_54(814-830)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2014
  • (2024)Extending the range of bugs that automated program repair can handleJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111918209(111918)Online publication date: Mar-2024
  • (2023)Commutativity for Concurrent Program Termination ProofsComputer Aided Verification10.1007/978-3-031-37706-8_6(109-131)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Towards Extending the Range of Bugs That Automated Program Repair Can Handle2022 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS57517.2022.00031(209-220)Online publication date: Dec-2022
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