Publication detail

Pointer Race Freedom

HOLÍK, L. MEYER, R. WOLF, S. HAZIZA, F.

Original Title

Pointer Race Freedom

Type

conference paper

Language

English

Original Abstract

We propose a novel notion of pointer race for concurrent programs manipulating a shared heap. A pointer race is an access to a memory address which was freed, and it is out of the accessors control whether or not the cell has been re-allocated. We establish two results. (1) Under the assumption of pointer race freedom, it is sound to verify a program running under explicit memory management as if it was running with garbage collection. (2) Even the requirement of pointer race freedom itself can be verified under the garbage-collected semantics. We then prove analogues of the theorems for a stronger notion of pointer race needed to cope with performance-critical code purposely using racy comparisons and even racy dereferences of pointers. As a practical contribution, we apply our results to optimize a thread-modular analysis under explicit memory management. Our experiments confirm a speed-up of up to two orders of magnitude.

Keywords

pointer race pointer race freedom garbage collecting semantics memory managed semantics thread modular reasoning

Authors

HOLÍK, L.; MEYER, R.; WOLF, S.; HAZIZA, F.

Released

7. 1. 2016

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Location

Berlin

ISBN

978-3-662-49121-8

Book

Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI)

Edition

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Pages from

393

Pages to

412

Pages count

20

URL

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-662-49122-5_19

BibTex

@inproceedings{BUT130931,
  author="Lukáš {Holík} and Roland {Meyer} and Sebastian {Wolf} and Frédéric {Haziza}",
  title="Pointer Race Freedom",
  booktitle="Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI)",
  year="2016",
  series="Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
  volume="9583",
  pages="393--412",
  publisher="Springer Verlag",
  address="Berlin",
  doi="10.1007/978-3-662-49122-5\{_}19",
  isbn="978-3-662-49121-8",
  url="http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-662-49122-5_19"
}