Effective stateless model checking for C/C++ concurrency

M Kokologiannakis, O Lahav, K Sagonas… - Proceedings of the ACM …, 2017 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 2017dl.acm.org
We present a stateless model checking algorithm for verifying concurrent programs running
under RC11, a repaired version of the C/C++ 11 memory model without dependency cycles.
Unlike most previous approaches, which enumerate thread interleavings up to some partial
order reduction improvements, our approach works directly on execution graphs and (in the
absence of RMW instructions and SC atomics) avoids redundant exploration by
construction. We have implemented a model checker, called RCMC, based on this approach …
We present a stateless model checking algorithm for verifying concurrent programs running under RC11, a repaired version of the C/C++11 memory model without dependency cycles. Unlike most previous approaches, which enumerate thread interleavings up to some partial order reduction improvements, our approach works directly on execution graphs and (in the absence of RMW instructions and SC atomics) avoids redundant exploration by construction. We have implemented a model checker, called RCMC, based on this approach and applied it to a number of challenging concurrent programs. Our experiments confirm that RCMC is significantly faster, scales better than other model checking tools, and is also more resilient to small changes in the benchmarks.
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