Abstract
One of the key problems with parallel programs is ensuring that they do not hang or wait indefinitely – i.e., there are no deadlocks, livelocks and the program proceeds towards its goals. In this work, we present a practical approach to detection of nonterminating sections of programs written in C or C++, and its implementation into the DIVINE model checker. This complements the existing techniques for finding safety violations such as assertion failures and memory errors. Our approach makes it possible to detect partial deadlocks and livelocks, i.e., those situations in which some of the threads are progressing normally while the others are waiting indefinitely. The approach is also applicable to programs that do not terminate (such as daemons with infinite control loops) as it can be configured to check only for termination of selected sections of the program. The termination criteria can be user-provided; however, DIVINE comes with the set of built-in termination criteria suited for the analysis of programs with mutexes and other common synchronisation primitives.
This work has been partially supported by the Czech Science Foundation grant No. 18-02177S.
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Notes
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This is not a problem in practice as any blocking synchronisation (such as waiting for a mutex) can be simulated by a busy waiting loop.
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Also sometimes called bottom strongly connected components, or closed communicating classes, especially in the area of probabilistic system analysis [12].
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For our purposes, a weakly-fair scheduler is a scheduler which ensures that on every accepting cycle in the state space all threads which existed during the execution of this cycle were also executed at least once on the cycle.
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Štill, V., Barnat, J. (2019). Local Nontermination Detection for Parallel C++ Programs. In: Ölveczky, P., Salaün, G. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11724. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30446-1_20
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