Software Verification for Weak Memory via Program Transformation

Abstract

Despite multiprocessors implementing weak memory models, verification methods often assume Sequential Consistency (SC), thus may miss bugs due to weak memory. We propose a sound transformation of the program to verify, enabling SC tools to perform verification w.r.t. weak memory. We present experiments for a broad variety of models (from x86/TSO to Power/ARM) and a vast range of verification tools, quantify the additional cost of the transformation and highlight the cases when we can drastically reduce it. Our benchmarks include work-queue management code from PostgreSQL.