‹Programming› 2020
Mon 23 - Thu 26 March 2020 Porto, Portugal
Wed 25 Mar 2020 15:00 - 15:30 at Auditorium - Engineering Correctness

This work strives to make formal verification of POSIX multithreaded programs easily accessible to general programmers. Sthread operates directly on multithreaded C/C++ programs, without the need for an intermediate formal model. Sthread is in-vivo in that it provides a drop-in replacement for the pthread library, and operates directly on the compiled target executable and application libraries. There is no compiler-generated intermediate representation. The system calls in the application remain unaltered. Optionally, the programmer can add a small amount of additional native C code to include assertions based on the user’s algorithm, declarations of shared memory regions, and progress/liveness conditions. The work has two important motivations: (i) It can be used to verify correctness of a concurrent algorithm being implemented with multithreading; and (ii) it can also be used pedagogically to provide immediate feedback to students learning either to employ POSIX threads system calls or to implement multithreaded algorithms. This work represents the first example of in-vivo model checking operating directly on the standard multithreaded executable and its libraries, without the aid of a compiler-generated intermediate representation. Sthread leverages the open-source SimGrid libraries, and will eventually be integrated into SimGrid. Sthread employs a non-preemptive model in which thread context switches occur only at multithreaded system calls (e.g., mutex, semaphore) or before accesses to shared memory regions. The emphasis is on finding “algorithmic bugs” (bugs in an original algorithm, implemented as POSIX threads and shared memory regions. This work is in contrast to Context-Bounded Analysis (CBA), which assumes a preemptive model for threads, and emphasizes implementation bugs such as buffer overruns and write-after-free for memory allocation. In particular, the Sthread in-vivo approach has strong future potential for pedagogy, by providing immediate feedback to students who are first learning the correct use of Pthreads system calls in implementation of concurrent algorithms based on multithreading.

Wed 25 Mar

Displayed time zone: Belfast change

14:00 - 15:30
Engineering CorrectnessResearch Papers at Auditorium
14:00
30m
Research paper
Lightweight Lexical Test Prioritization for Immediate Feedback
Research Papers
Toni Mattis Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Robert Hirschfeld Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI), Germany
Link to publication DOI Pre-print
14:30
30m
Research paper
Robust Contract Evolution in a TypeSafe MicroServices Architecture
Research Papers
João Costa Seco NOVA LINCS -- Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Paulo Ferreira OutSystems SA, Hugo Lourenço OutSystems SA, Carla Ferreira Universidade Nova Lisboa, Lucio Ferrao OutSystems
Link to publication DOI Pre-print
15:00
30m
Research paper
Sthread: In-Vivo Model-Checking of Multithreaded Programs
Research Papers
Gene Cooperman Northeastern University, Martin Quinson École Normale Supérieure Rennes
Link to publication DOI Pre-print