Efficient verification of periodic programs using sequential consistency and snapshots

Abstract

We verify safety properties of periodic programs, consisting of periodically activated threads scheduled preemptively based on their priorities. We develop an approach based on generating, and solving, a provably correct verification condition (VC). The VC is generated by adapting Lamport's sequential consistency to the semantics of periodic programs. Our approach is able to handle periodic programs that synchronize via two commonly used types of locks - priority ceiling protocol (PCP) locks, and CPU locks. To improve the scalability of our approach, we develop a strategy called snapshotting, which leads to VCs containing fewer redundant sub-formulas, and are therefore more easily solved by current SMT engines. We develop two types of snapshotting - SS-ALL snapshots all shared variables aggressively, while SS-MOD snapshots only modified variables. We have implemented our approach in a tool. Experiments on a benchmark of robot controllers indicate that SS-MOD is the best overall strategy, and even outperforms significantly the state-of-the art periodic program verifier prior to this work.