A Decision Procedure for Detecting Atomicity Violations for Communicating Processes with Locks

Abstract

We present a new decision procedure for detecting property violations in pushdown models for concurrent programs that use lock-based synchronization, where each thread’s lock operations are properly nested (à la synchronized methods in Java). The technique detects violations expressed as indexed phase automata (PAs)—a class of non-deterministic finite automata in which the only loops are self-loops.Our interest in PAs stems from their ability to capture atomic-set serializability violations. (Atomic-set serializability is a relaxation of atomicity to only a user-specified set of memory locations.) We implemented the decision procedure and applied it to detecting atomic-set-serializability violations in models of concurrent Java programs. Compared with a prior method based on a semi-decision procedure, not only was the decision procedure 7.5X faster overall, but the semi-decision procedure timed out on about 68% of the queries versus 4% for the decision procedure.KeywordsModel CheckDecision ProcedureConcurrent ProgramContext SwitchRule SequenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.