Bounded-Interference Sequentialization for Testing Concurrent Programs

Razavi, Niloofar; Farzan, Azadeh; Holzer, Andreas

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-34026-0_28

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…Farzan et al [36] extend this idea to concurrent programs and call it (con)2colic testing. They use the notion of thread interference scenario, which is a representation of a set of bounded interferences [37] among the threads, which define the scheduling constraints for a concurrent program run. These interference scenarios are then explored in a systematic way by generating a schedule and input vectors that conform with the scenario.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallel bug-finding in concurrent programs via reduced interleaving instances

Nguyen

Schrammel

Fischer

et al. 2017

2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)

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Concurrency poses a major challenge for program verification, but it can also offer an opportunity to scale when subproblems can be analysed in parallel. We exploit this opportunity here and use a parametrizable code-to-code translation to generate a set of simpler program instances, each capturing a reduced set of the original program's interleavings. These instances can then be checked independently in parallel. Our approach does not depend on the tool that is chosen for the final analysis, is compatible with weak memory models, and amplifies the effectiveness of existing tools, making them find bugs faster and with fewer resources. We use Lazy-CSeq as an off-the-shelf final verifier to demonstrate that our approach is able, already with a small number of cores, to find bugs in the hardest known concurrency benchmarks in a matter of minutes, whereas other dynamic and static tools fail to do so in hours.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallel bug-finding in concurrent programs via reduced interleaving instances

Nguyen

Schrammel

Fischer

et al. 2017

2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)

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Perspectives on White-Box Testing: Coverage, Concurrency, and Concolic Execution

Farzan

Holzer

Veith

2015

2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)

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The last years have seen a fruitful exchange of ideas between automated software verification and white-box software testing; the industrial impact of concolic testing for sequential software is the most notable result of this interdisciplinary effort. While concolic testing is very successful at finding bugs, and even achieves verification in the limit, it is often hard to quantify the progress it achieves towards verification. In this paper, we survey two recent projects which aim to remedy this situation: In the FQL project, we devise a test specification language which facilitates precise specification of coverage criteria, and a separation of concerns between test specification and test case generation. In con2colic testing, we develop a concolic testing methodology for concurrent programs where progress is measured in terms of the data flow between program threads.

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Bounded Verification of Multi-threaded Programs via Lazy Sequentialization

Inverso

Tomasco²,

Fischer

et al. 2021

ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst.

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Bounded verification techniques such as bounded model checking (BMC) have successfully been used for many practical program analysis problems, but concurrency still poses a challenge. Here, we describe a new approach to BMC of sequentially consistent imperative programs that use POSIX threads. We first translate the multi-threaded program into a nondeterministic sequential program that preserves reachability for all round-robin schedules with a given bound on the number of rounds. We then reuse existing high-performance BMC tools as backends for the sequential verification problem. Our translation is carefully designed to introduce very small memory overheads and very few sources of nondeterminism, so it produces tight SAT/SMT formulae, and is thus very effective in practice: Our Lazy-CSeq tool implementing this translation for the C programming language won several gold and silver medals in the concurrency category of the Software Verification Competitions (SV-COMP) 2014–2021 and was able to find errors in programs where all other techniques (including testing) failed. In this article, we give a detailed description of our translation and prove its correctness, sketch its implementation using the CSeq framework, and report on a detailed evaluation and comparison of our approach.

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Bounded-Interference Sequentialization for Testing Concurrent Programs

Cited by 3 publications

References 17 publications

Parallel bug-finding in concurrent programs via reduced interleaving instances

Parallel bug-finding in concurrent programs via reduced interleaving instances

Perspectives on White-Box Testing: Coverage, Concurrency, and Concolic Execution

Bounded Verification of Multi-threaded Programs via Lazy Sequentialization

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