Stateless Model Checking under a Reads-Value-From Equivalence

TL;DR

This paper introduces RVF-SMC, a novel stateless model checking algorithm that uses a reads-value-from equivalence to significantly reduce the state space and improve efficiency in verifying concurrent programs.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new RVF partitioning method that is coarser than existing approaches, enabling more efficient exploration of concurrent program behaviors.

Findings

RVF partitioning is exponentially coarser than previous methods.

RVF-SMC achieves significant speed-ups in model checking tasks.

Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of RVF in reducing state space.

Abstract

Stateless model checking (SMC) is one of the standard approaches to the verification of concurrent programs. As scheduling non-determinism creates exponentially large spaces of thread interleavings, SMC attempts to partition this space into equivalence classes and explore only a few representatives from each class. The efficiency of this approach depends on two factors: (a) the coarseness of the partitioning, and (b) the time to generate representatives in each class. For this reason, the search for coarse partitionings that are efficiently explorable is an active research challenge. In this work we present RVF-SMC, a new SMC algorithm that uses a novel \emph{reads-value-from (RVF)} partitioning. Intuitively, two interleavings are deemed equivalent if they agree on the value obtained in each read event, and read events induce consistent causal orderings between them. The RVF partitioning is provably coarser than recent approaches based on Mazurkiewicz and "reads-from" partitionings. Our experimental evaluation reveals that RVF is quite often a very effective equivalence, as the underlying partitioning is exponentially coarser than other approaches. Moreover, RVF-SMC generates representatives very efficiently, as the reduction in the partitioning is often met with significant speed-ups in the model checking task.