Proving thread termination

  • Authors:

  • Byron Cook;Andreas Podelski;Andrey Rybalchenko

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Research, Cambridge, Great Britain;University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany;EPFL and MPI, Lausanne, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Concurrent programs are often designed such that certain functions executing within critical threads must terminate. Examples of such cases can be found in operating systems, web servers, e-mail clients, etc. Unfortunately, no known automatic program termination prover supports a practical method of proving the termination of threads. In this paper we describe such a procedure. The procedure's scalability is achieved through the use of environment models that abstract away the surrounding threads. The procedure's accuracy is due to a novel method of incrementally constructing environment abstractions. Our method finds the conditions that a thread requires of its environment in order to establish termination by looking at the conditions necessary to prove that certain paths through the thread represent well-founded relations if executed in isolation of the other threads. The paper gives a description of experimental results using an implementation of our procedureon Windows device drivers and adescription of a previously unknown bug found withthe tool.