Formal verification of concurrent programs with read-write locks

Abstract

Read-write locking is an important mechanism to improve concurrent granularity, but it is difficult to reason about the safety of concurrent programs with read-write locks. Concurrent separation logic (CSL) provides a simple but powerful technique for locally reasoning about concurrent programs with mutual exclusive locks. Unfortunately, CSL cannot be directly applied to reasoning about concurrent programs with read-write locks due to the different concurrent control mechanisms.
This paper focuses on extending CSL and presenting a proof-carrying code (PCC) system for reasoning about concurrent programs with read-write locks. We extend the heap model with a writing permission set, denoted as logical heap, then define “strong separation” and “weak separation” over logical heap. Following CSL’s local-reasoning idea, we develop a novel program logic to enforce weak separations of heap between different threads and provide verification of concurrent programs with read-write locks.

Keywords

verification / concurrent separation logic / mutual exclusive locks / read-write locks