Work

On Reducing Linearizability to State Reachability

Year: 2015
Type: preprint
Abstract: Efficient implementations of atomic objects such as concurrent stacks and queues are especially susceptible to programming errors, and necessitate automatic verification. Unfortunately their correctness criteria - linearizability with respect to given ADT specifications - are hard to verify. Even on classes of implementations where the usual temporal safety properties like control-state reachability are decidable, linearizability is undecidable. In this work we demonstrate that verifying linearizability for certain fixed ADT specifications is reducible to control-state reachability, despite being harder for arbitrary ADTs. We effectuate this reduction for several of the most popular atomic objects. This reduction yields the first decidability results for verification without bounding the number of concurrent threads. Furthermore, it enables the application of existing safety-verification tools to linearizability verification.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2953158016
Cites: 9
Cited by: 6
Related to: 20