Stateless Model Checking Under a Reads-Value-From Equivalence

Abstract

Stateless model checking (SMC) is one of the standard approaches to the verification of concurrent programs. As scheduling non-determinism creates exponentially large spaces of thread interleavings, SMC attempts to partition this space into equivalence classes and explore only a few representatives from each class. The efficiency of this approach depends on two factors: (a) the coarseness of the partitioning, and (b) the time to generate representatives in each class. For this reason, the search for coarse partitionings that are efficiently explorable is an active research challenge.In this work we present $${\text {RVF-SMC}}$$ RVF-SMC , a new SMC algorithm that uses a novel reads-value-from (RVF) partitioning. Intuitively, two interleavings are deemed equivalent if they agree on the value obtained in each read event, and read events induce consistent causal orderings between them. The RVF partitioning is provably coarser than recent approaches based on Mazurkiewicz and “reads-from” partitionings. Our experimental evaluation reveals that RVF is quite often a very effective equivalence, as the underlying partitioning is exponentially coarser than other approaches. Moreover, $${\text {RVF-SMC}}$$ RVF-SMC generates representatives very efficiently, as the reduction in the partitioning is often met with significant speed-ups in the model checking task.

CSSTs: A Dynamic Data Structure for Partial Orders in Concurrent Execution Analysis

“…Consider the analysis of an abstract trace shown in Figure 1, consisting of three threads and write/read events w(𝑥, 𝑣)/r(𝑥, 𝑣), where 𝑥 is a variable and 𝑣 is a value. The consistency-testing problem asks whether there is an interleaving that is consistent with the values observed by each read [18], and has numerous applications in dynamic concurrency analyses [4,7,9,10,14,19,20,23,34,37]. The analysis maintains (i) a reads-from map w(𝑥, 𝑣) ↦ → r(𝑥, 𝑣), denoting that r(𝑥, 𝑣) obtains its value from w(𝑥, 𝑣), and (ii) a partial order 𝑃 that is induced by this reads-from map and any additional indirect orderings this might impose.…”

Dynamic Partial Order Reduction Based on Interference Solution

“…The program had 12 interleavings (4!/2!) under the SC memory model [1,19,28,30], divided into four Mazurkiewicz equivalence classes. DPOR based on numerical equivalence generates only four Mazurkiewicz traces for this program.…”

“…Stateless Model Checking (SMC [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]) is an effective verification technique for finite-steps concurrent programs. Applying SMC to larger programs requires one to reduce its memory consumption.…”

“…Therefore, SMC is adopted in conjunction with clever DPOR [8][9][10][11][12][13] to lower the number of traces to be explored, covering all possible program behaviors. DPOR classifies program executions into equivalence classes based on certain relations, such as Mazurkiewicz trace equivalence [14][15][16][17][18], value-based trace equivalence [2,8,13], observational equivalence [11], and read relation equivalence [1,19,20]. In the case of data value-oriented trace equivalence, if the final data value of the two traces is the same (we are not only the same data value, or the similarity is equivalent), the two traces are considered to be equivalent.…”

Truly stateless, optimal dynamic partial order reduction

“…First, many techniques aim to combat the state-space explosion problem by introducing coarser equivalence partitionings [Abdulla et al 2019;Agarwal et al 2021;Albert et al 2017;Aronis et al 2018;Chalupa et al 2017;Chatterjee et al 2019]. Among these, only Nidhugg [Abdulla et al 2019;Aronis et al 2018] is optimal w.r.t.…”