Abstract. We, the organizers and participants, report our experiences from the 1st Verified Software Competition, held in August 2010 in Edinburgh at the VSTTE 2010 conference.
We describe a practical method for reasoning about realistic concurrent programs. Our method allows global two-state invariants that restrict update of shared state. We provide simple, sufficient conditions for checking those global invariants modularly. The method has been implemented in VCC 1 , an automatic, sound, modular verifier for concurrent C programs. VCC has been used to verify functional correctness of tens of thousands of lines of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform 2 and of SYSGO's embedded real-time operating system PikeOS.1 VCC is available in source for academic use at http://vcc.codeplex.com/ 2 The Hypervisor verification is part of the Verisoft XT project supported by BMBF under grant 01IS07008. 3 Objects mean collections of closely related data, e.g., regions of memory interpreted as structs in C.
Abstract. Efficient TLB virtualization is a core component of modern hypervisors. Verifying such code is challenging; the code races with TLB virtualization code in other processors, with other guest threads, and with the hardware TLBs, and implements an abstract TLB that races with other abstract TLBs and guest threads. We give a general methodology for verifying virtual device implementations, and demonstrate the verification of TLB virtualization code (using shadow page tables) in the concurrent C verifier VCC. To our knowledge, this is the first verification of any kind against a realistic model of a modern hardware MMU.
Reductions that aggregate fine-grained transitions into coarser transitions can significantly reduce the cost of automated verification, by reducing the size of the state space. We propose a reduction that can exploit common synchronization disciplines, such as the use of mutual exclusion for accesses to shared data structures. Exploiting them using traditional reduction theorems requires checking that the discipline is followed in the original (i.e., unreduced) system. That check can be prohibitively expensive. This paper presents a reduction that instead requires checking whether the discipline is followed in the reduced system. This check may be much cheaper, because the reachable state space is smaller.
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