Mechanized verification of fine-grained concurrent programs

Abstract

Efficient concurrent programs and data structures rarely employ coarse-grained synchronization mechanisms (i.e., locks); instead, they implement custom synchronization patterns via fine-grained primitives, such as compare-and-swap. Due to sophisticated interference scenarios between threads, reasoning about such programs is challenging and error-prone, and can benefit from mechanization. In this paper, we present the first completely formalized framework for mechanized verification of full functional correctness of fine-grained concurrent programs. Our tool is based on the recently proposed program logic FCSL. It is implemented as an embedded DSL in the dependently-typed language of the Coq proof assistant, and is powerful enough to reason about programming features such as higher-order functions and local thread spawning. By incorporating a uniform concurrency model, based on state-transition systems and partial commutative monoids, FCSL makes it possible to build proofs about concurrent libraries in a thread-local, compositional way, thus facilitating scalability and reuse: libraries are verified just once, and their specifications are used ubiquitously in client-side reasoning. We illustrate the proof layout in FCSL by example, outline its infrastructure, and report on our experience of using FCSL to verify a number of concurrent algorithms and data structures.