Verification and coverage of message passing multicore applications

  • Authors:

  • Etem Deniz;Alper Sen;Jim Holt

  • Affiliations:

  • Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey;Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey;Freescale Semiconductor Inc., Austin, TX

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) - Special section on verification challenges in the concurrent world
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We describe verification and coverage methods for multicore software that uses message passing libraries for communication. Specifically, we provide techniques to improve reliability of software using the new industry standard MCAPI by the Multicore Association. We develop dynamic predictive verification techniques that allow us to find actual and potential errors in a multicore software. Some of these error types are deadlocks, race conditions, and violation of temporal assertions. We complement our verification techniques with a mutation-testing-based coverage metric. Coverage metrics enable measuring the quality of verification tests. We implemented our techniques in tools and validated them on several multicore programs that use the MCAPI standard. We implement our techniques in tools and experimentally show the effectiveness of our approach. We find errors that are not found using traditional dynamic verification techniques and we can potentially explore execution schedules different than the original program with our coverage tool. This is the first time such predictive verification and coverage metrics have been developed for MCAPI.