Scalable automatic linearizability checking

• Authors: Shao Jie Zhang
• Venue: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
• Year: 2011

Concurrent data structures are widely used but notoriously difficult to implement correctly. Linearizability is one main correctness criterion of concurrent data structure algorithms. It guarantees that a concurrent data structure appears as a sequential one to users. Unfortunately, linearizability is challenging to verify since a subtle bug may only manifest in a small portion of numerous thread interleavings. Model checking is therefore a potential primary candidate. However, current approaches of model checking linearizability suffer from severe state space explosion problem and are thus restricted in handling few threads and/or operations. This paper describes a scalable, fully automatic and general linearizability checking method based on [16] by incorporating symmetry and partial order reduction techniques. Our insights emerged from the observation that the similarity of threads using concurrent data structures causes model checking to generate large redundant equivalent portions of the state space, and the loose coupling of threads causes it to explore lots of unnecessary transition execution orders. We prove that symmetry reduction and partial order reduction can be combined in our approach and integrate them into the model checking algorithm. We demonstrate its efficiency using a number of real-world concurrent data structure algorithms.