F.4.3 Formal Languages (D.3.1)
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Knowing the extent to which we rely on technology one may think that correct programs are nowadays the norm. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Luckily, possible reasons why program correctness is difficult often come hand in hand with some solutions. Consider concurrent program correctness under Sequential Consistency (SC). Under SC, instructions of each program's concurrent component are executed atomically and in order. By using logic to represent correctness specifications, model checking provides a successful solution to concurrent program verification under SC. Alas, SC’s atomicity assumptions do not reflect the reality of hardware architectures. Total Store Order (TSO) is a less common memory model implemented in SPARC and in Intel x86 multiprocessors that relaxes the SC constraints. While the architecturally de-atomized execution of stores under TSO speeds up program execution, it also complicates program verification. To be precise, due to TSO’s unbounded store buffers, a program’s semantics under TSO might be infinite. This, for example, turns reachability under SC (a PSPACE-complete task) into a non-primitive-recursive-complete problem under TSO. This thesis develops verification techniques targeting TSO-relaxed programs. To be precise, we present under- and over-approximating heuristics for checking reachability in TSO-relaxed programs as well as state-reducing methods for speeding up such heuristics. In a first contribution, we propose an algorithm to check reachability of TSO-relaxed programs lazily. The under-approximating refinement algorithm uses auxiliary variables to simulate TSO’s buffers along instruction sequences suggested by an oracle. The oracle’s deciding characteristic is that if it returns the empty sequence then the program’s SC- and TSO-reachable states are the same. Secondly, we propose several approaches to over-approximate TSO buffers. Combined in a refinement algorithm, these approaches can be used to determine safety with respect to TSO reachability for a large class of TSO-relaxed programs. On the more technical side, we prove that checking reachability is decidable when TSO buffers are approximated by multisets with tracked per address last-added-values. Finally, we analyze how the explored state space can be reduced when checking TSO and SC reachability. Intuitively, through the viewpoint of Shasha-and-Snir-like traces, we exploit the structure of program instructions to explain several state-space reducing methods including dynamic and cartesian partial order reduction.
Sequential Consistency (SC) is the memory model traditionally applied by programmers and verification tools for the analysis of multithreaded programs.
SC guarantees that instructions of each thread are executed atomically and in program order.
Modern CPUs implement memory models that relax the SC guarantees: threads can execute instructions out of order, stores to the memory can be observed by different threads in different order.
As a result of these relaxations, multithreaded programs can show unexpected, potentially undesired behaviors, when run on real hardware.
The robustness problem asks if a program has the same behaviors under SC and under a relaxed memory model.
Behaviors are formalized in terms of happens-before relations — dataflow and control-flow relations between executed instructions.
Programs that are robust against a memory model produce the same results under this memory model and under SC.
This means, they only need to be verified under SC, and the verification results will carry over to the relaxed setting.
Interestingly, robustness is a suitable correctness criterion not only for multithreaded programs, but also for parallel programs running on computer clusters.
Parallel programs written in Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming model, when executed on cluster, consist of multiple processes, each running on its cluster node.
These processes can directly access memories of each other over the network, without the need of explicit synchronization.
Reorderings and delays introduced on the network level, just as the reorderings done by the CPUs, may result into unexpected behaviors that are hard to reproduce and fix.
Our first contribution is a generic approach for solving robustness against relaxed memory models.
The approach involves two steps: combinatorial analysis, followed by an algorithmic development.
The aim of combinatorial analysis is to show that among program computations violating robustness there is always a computation in a certain normal form, where reorderings are applied in a restricted way.
In the algorithmic development we work out a decision procedure for checking whether a program has violating normal-form computations.
Our second contribution is an application of the generic approach to widely implemented memory models, including Total Store Order used in Intel x86 and Sun SPARC architectures, the memory model of Power architecture, and the PGAS memory model.
We reduce robustness against TSO to SC state reachability for a modified input program.
Robustness against Power and PGAS is reduced to language emptiness for a novel class of automata — multiheaded automata.
The reductions lead to new decidability results.
In particular, robustness is PSPACE-complete for all the considered memory models.
Over a period of 30 years, ITU-T’s Specification and Description Language (SDL) has matured to a sophisticated formal modelling language for distributed systems and communication protocols. The language definition of SDL-2000, the latest version of SDL, is complex and difficult to maintain. Full tool support for SDL is costly to implement. Therefore, only subsets of SDL are currently supported by tools. These SDL subsets - called SDL profiles - already cover a wide range of systems, and are often suffcient in practice. In this report, we present our approach for extracting the formal semantics for SDL profiles from the complete SDL semantics. We then formalise the approach, present our SDL-profile tool, and report on our experiences.