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TSO to SC via Symbolic Execution

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Hardware and Software: Verification and Testing (HVC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9434))

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Abstract

Modern multi-core processors equipped with weak memory models like TSO exhibit executions which – due to store buffers – seemingly reorder program operations. Thus, they deviate from the commonly assumed sequential consistency (SC) semantics. Analysis techniques for concurrent programs consequently need to take reorderings into account. For TSO, this is often accomplished by explicitly modelling store buffers.

In this paper, we present an approach for reducing TSO-verification of concurrent programs (with fenced or write-free loops) to SC-verification, thereby being able to reuse standard verification tools. To this end, we transform a given program P into a new program \(P'\) whose SC-semantics is (bisimulation-) equivalent to the TSO-semantics of P. The transformation proceeds via a symbolic execution of P, however, only with respect to store buffer contents. Out of the thus obtained abstraction of P, we generate the SC program \(P'\) which can then be the target of standard analysis tools.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See e.g. T. Lane. Yes, waitlatch is vulnerable to weak-memory-ordering bugs, http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/24241.1312739269@sss.pgh.pa.us, 2011.

  2. 2.

    http://www.llvm.org.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/oleg82upb.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Informatik, Universität Paderborn, 33098, Paderborn, Germany

    Heike Wehrheim & Oleg Travkin

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  1. Heike Wehrheim
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  2. Oleg Travkin
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Correspondence to Oleg Travkin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

    Nir Piterman

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Wehrheim, H., Travkin, O. (2015). TSO to SC via Symbolic Execution. In: Piterman, N. (eds) Hardware and Software: Verification and Testing. HVC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9434. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26287-1_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26287-1_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26286-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26287-1

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