Article

Verifying concurrent programs against sequential specifications

Authors:

Ahmed Bouajjani,

Constantin Enea,

Jad HamzaAuthors Info & Claims

ESOP'13: Proceedings of the 22nd European conference on Programming Languages and Systems

Pages 290 - 309

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37036-6_17

Published: 16 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate the algorithmic feasibility of checking whether concurrent implementations of shared-memory objects adhere to their given sequential specifications; sequential consistency, linearizability, and conflict serializability are the canonical variations of this problem. While verifying sequential consistency of systems with unbounded concurrency is known to be undecidable, we demonstrate that conflict serializability, and linearizability with fixed linearization points are EXPSPACE-complete, while the general linearizability problem is undecidable.

Our (un)decidability proofs, besides bestowing novel theoretical results, also reveal novel program explorations strategies. For instance, we show that every violation to conflict serializability is captured by a conflict cycle whose length is bounded independently from the number of concurrent operations. This suggests an incomplete detection algorithm which only remembers a small subset of conflict edges, which can be made complete by increasing the number of remembered edges to the cycle-length bound. Similarly, our undecidability proof for linearizability suggests an incomplete detection algorithm which limits the number of "barriers" bisecting non-overlapping operations. Our decidability proof of bounded-barrier linearizability is interesting on its own, as it reduces the consideration of all possible operation serializations to numerical constraint solving. The literature seems to confirm that most violations are detectable by considering very few conflict edges or barriers.

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Cited By

Enea CKoskinen E(2024)Scenario-Based Proofs for Concurrent ObjectsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36498578:OOPSLA1(1294-1323)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
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Castañeda ARodríguez GOshman RNolin AHalldorsson MBalliu A(2023)Asynchronous Wait-Free Runtime Verification and Enforcement of LinearizabilityProceedings of the 2023 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing10.1145/3583668.3594563(90-101)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
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Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

ESOP'13: Proceedings of the 22nd European conference on Programming Languages and Systems

March 2013

613 pages

ISBN:9783642370359

Editors:
Matthias Felleisen
College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
,
Philippa Gardner
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, MA, UK

Sponsors

Sapienza: Sapienza University of Rome

In-Cooperation

EAPLS: European Association for Programming Languages and Systems
EATCS: European Association for Theoretical Computer Science
European Association of Software Science and Technology

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 16 March 2013

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Cited By

Enea CKoskinen E(2024)Scenario-Based Proofs for Concurrent ObjectsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36498578:OOPSLA1(1294-1323)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649857
Castañeda ARodríguez GOshman RNolin AHalldorsson MBalliu A(2023)Asynchronous Wait-Free Runtime Verification and Enforcement of LinearizabilityProceedings of the 2023 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing10.1145/3583668.3594563(90-101)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3583668.3594563
Jia QLv YWu PZhan BHao JYe HWang C(2023)VeriLin: A Linearizability Checker for Large-Scale Concurrent ObjectsTheoretical Aspects of Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-35257-7_12(202-220)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-35257-7_12
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König JWehrheim H(2021)On the Correctness Problem for SerializabilityTheoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 202110.1007/978-3-030-85315-0_4(47-64)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2021
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Peterson CCook VDechev D(2021)Concurrent Correctness in Vector SpaceVerification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation10.1007/978-3-030-67067-2_8(151-173)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2021
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Feldman YKhyzha AEnea CMorrison ANanevski ARinetzky NShoham S(2020)Proving highly-concurrent traversals correctProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34281964:OOPSLA(1-29)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
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