Verification of programs under the release-acquire semantics

Abstract

We address the verification of concurrent programs running under the release-acquire (RA) semantics. We show that the reachability problem is undecidable even in the case where the input program is finite-state. Given this undecidability, we follow the spirit of the work on context-bounded analysis for detecting bugs in programs under the classical SC model, and propose an under-approximate reachability analysis for the case of RA. To this end, we propose a novel notion, called view-switching, and provide a code-to-code translation from an input program under RA to a program under SC. This leads to a reduction, in polynomial time, of the bounded view-switching reachability problem under RA to the bounded context-switching problem under SC. We have implemented a prototype tool VBMC and tested it on a set of benchmarks, demonstrating that many bugs in programs can be found using a small number of view switches.