An Expressive Framework for Verifying Deadlock Freedom

Abstract

This paper presents an expressive specification and verification framework for ensuring deadlock freedom of shared-memory concurrent programs that manipulate locks. We introduce a novel delayed lockset checking technique to guarantee deadlock freedom of programs with interactions between thread and lock operations. With disjunctive formulae, we highlight how an abstraction based on precise lockset can be supported in our framework. By combining our technique with locklevels, we form a unified formalism for ensuring deadlock freedom from (1) double lock acquisition, (2) interactions between thread and lock operations, and (3) unordered locking. The proposed framework is general, and can be integrated with existing specification logics such as separation logic. Specifically, we have implemented this framework into a prototype tool, called ParaHIP, to automatically verify deadlock freedom and correctness of concurrent programs against user-supplied specifications.