Towards LTL Model Checking of Unmodified Thread-Based C C++ Programs

摘要

In this paper we present a new approach to verification of multi-threaded C/C++ programs. Our solution effectively chains the parallel and distributed-memory model checker DiVinE with CLang and the LLVM bitcode interpreter. This combination offers full LTL, distributed-memory model checking of virtually unmodified C/C++ source code and is supported by a newly introduced path-reduction technique. We demonstrate the efficiency of the reduction and also the capacity to produce human-readable counter-examples in two small case studies: a C implementation of the Peterson's mutual exclusion protocol and a C++ implementation of a shared-memory, lock-free FIFO data structure designed for fast inter-thread communication.