A Light-Weight Approach for Verifying Multi-Threaded Programs with CPAchecker

TL;DR

This paper presents a lightweight, modular extension to CPAchecker for verifying multi-threaded programs with a bounded number of threads, improving its applicability and efficiency in detecting reachability issues and deadlocks.

Contribution

It introduces a new configurable, orthogonal multi-threaded analysis component for CPAchecker that enhances verification capabilities without altering existing data-flow analyses.

Findings

Enhanced verification of multi-threaded programs with bounded threads.

Improved detection of deadlocks and reachability issues.

Optimization techniques increase analysis efficiency.

Abstract

Verifying multi-threaded programs is becoming more and more important, because of the strong trend to increase the number of processing units per CPU socket. We introduce a new configurable program analysis for verifying multi-threaded programs with a bounded number of threads. We present a simple and yet efficient implementation as component of the existing program-verification framework CPAchecker. While CPAchecker is already competitive on a large benchmark set of sequential verification tasks, our extension enhances the overall applicability of the framework. Our implementation of handling multiple threads is orthogonal to the abstract domain of the data-flow analysis, and thus, can be combined with several existing analyses in CPAchecker, like value analysis, interval analysis, and BDD analysis. The new analysis is modular and can be used, for example, to verify reachability properties as well as to detect deadlocks in the program. This paper includes an evaluation of the benefit of some optimization steps (e.g., changing the iteration order of the reachability algorithm or applying partial-order reduction) as well as the comparison with other state-of-the-art tools for verifying multi-threaded programs.