research-article

Verification of programs under the release-acquire semantics

Authors:

Parosh Aziz Abdulla,

Mohamed Faouzi Atig,

Shankaranarayanan KrishnaAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI 2019: Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

Pages 1117 - 1132

https://doi.org/10.1145/3314221.3314649

Published: 08 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

We address the verification of concurrent programs running under the release-acquire (RA) semantics. We show that the reachability problem is undecidable even in the case where the input program is finite-state. Given this undecidability, we follow the spirit of the work on context-bounded analysis for detecting bugs in programs under the classical SC model, and propose an under-approximate reachability analysis for the case of RA. To this end, we propose a novel notion, called view-switching, and provide a code-to-code translation from an input program under RA to a program under SC. This leads to a reduction, in polynomial time, of the bounded view-switching reachability problem under RA to the bounded context-switching problem under SC. We have implemented a prototype tool VBMC and tested it on a set of benchmarks, demonstrating that many bugs in programs can be found using a small number of view switches.

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Index Terms

Verification of programs under the release-acquire semantics
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Formal software verification

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cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI 2019: Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 2019

1162 pages

ISBN:9781450367127

DOI:10.1145/3314221

General Chair:
Kathryn S. McKinley
Google, USA
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Kathleen Fisher
Tufts University, USA

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Published: 08 June 2019

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656425
Margalit RChristakis MPradel M(2024)Robustness against the C/C++11 Memory ModelProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3685549(1881-1885)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3685549
Sharma DSharma S(2024)Parameterized Static Analysis for Weak Memory ModelsProceedings of the 17th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference10.1145/3641399.3641443(1-4)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641399.3641443
Ang ZMathur U(2024)Predictive Monitoring against Pattern Regular LanguagesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36329158:POPL(2191-2225)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632915
Zheng LLi YXin JLiu HZheng RLiao XJin H(2024)Minimal Context-Switching Data Race Detection with Dataflow TrackingJournal of Computer Science and Technology10.1007/s11390-023-1569-739:1(211-226)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11390-023-1569-7
Singh ALahav O(2024)Decidable Verification under Localized Release-Acquire ConcurrencyTools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems10.1007/978-3-031-57256-2_12(235-254)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-57256-2_12
Bouajjani A(2024)On Verifying Concurrent Programs Under Weak Consistency Models: Decidability and ComplexityTaming the Infinities of Concurrency10.1007/978-3-031-56222-8_7(133-147)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
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Lahav ODongol BWehrheim H(2023)Rely-Guarantee Reasoning for Causally Consistent Shared MemoryComputer Aided Verification10.1007/978-3-031-37706-8_11(206-229)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2023
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Dalvandi SDongol B(2022)Implementing and verifying release-acquire transactional memory in C11Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35633526:OOPSLA2(1817-1844)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
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Doherty SDalvandi SDongol BWehrheim H(2022)Unifying Operational Weak Memory Verification: An Axiomatic ApproachACM Transactions on Computational Logic10.1145/354511723:4(1-39)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
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