Effective stateless model checking
for C/C++ concurrency

Abstract

We present a stateless model checking algorithm for verifying concurrent programs running under RC11, a repaired version of the C/C++11 memory model without dependency cycles. Unlike most previous approaches, which enumerate thread interleavings up to some partial order reduction improvements, our approach works directly on execution graphs and (in the absence of RMW instructions and SC atomics) avoids redundant exploration by construction.

We have implemented a model checker, called RCMC, based on this approach and applied it to a number of challenging concurrent programs. Our experiments confirm that RCMC is significantly faster, scales better than other model checking tools, and is also more resilient to small changes in the benchmarks.

Paper

• Michalis Kokologiannakis, Ori Lahav, Konstantinos Sagonas, and Viktor Vafeiadis.
  Effective stateless model checking for C/C++ concurrency.
  Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 2, POPL, Article 17 (January 2018)
  [Paper (32 pages)] [Full paper with the technical appendix (53 pages)]
  [@ACM] [VM containing a binary of RCMC @ACM (2.2GB)]

People

• Michalis Kokologiannakis (NTUA)
• Ori Lahav (Tel Aviv University)
• Konstantinos Sagonas (Uppsala University)
• Viktor Vafeiadis (MPI-SWS)

Related projects

• GenMC: Α more advanced model checker.
• Repairing sequential consistency in C/C++11: defines the RC11 model that is used by RCMC.