Modular verification of multithreaded programs

Abstract

Multithreaded software systems are prone to errors due to the difficulty of reasoning about multiple interleaved threads operating on shared data. Static checkers that analyze a program's behavior over all execution paths and all thread interleavings are a powerful approach to identifying bugs in such systems. In this paper, we present Calvin, a scalable and expressive static checker for multithreaded programs based on automatic theorem proving. To handle realistic programs, Calvin performs modular checking of each procedure called by a thread using specifications of other procedures and other threads. Our experience applying Calvin to several real-world programs indicates that Calvin has a moderate annotation overhead and can catch common defects in multithreaded programs, such as synchronization errors and violations of data invariants.