A memory model sensitive checker for C.pdfVIP

A Memory Model Sensitive Checker for C# Quang Thuan Huynh and Abhik Roychoudhury School of Computing, National University of Singapore {huynhqua,abhik}@.sg Abstract. Modern concurrent programming languages like Java and C# have a programming language level memory model; it captures the set of all allowed behaviors of programs on any implementation platform — uni- or multi-processor. Such a memory model is typically weaker than Sequential Consistency and allows re-ordering of operations within a program thread. Therefore, programs verified correct by assuming Se- quential Consistency (that is, each thread proceeds in program order) may not behave correctly under certain platforms! The solution to this problem is to develop program checkers which are memory model sensi- tive. In this paper, we develop such a reachability analysis tool for the programming language C#. Our checker identifies program states which are reached only because the C# memory model is more relaxed than Sequential Consistency. Furthermore, our checker identifies (a) operation re-orderings which cause such undesirable states to be reached, and (b) simple program modifications — by inserting memory barrier operations — which prevent such undesirable re-orderings. 1 Introduction Modern mainstream programming languages like Java and C# support multi- threading as an essential feature of the language. In these languages multiple threads can access shared objects. Moreover, synchronization mechanisms exist for controlling access to shared objects by threads. If every access to a shared object by any thread is preceded by acquisition of a common lock, then the pro- gram is guaranteed to be “properly synchronized”. The synchronization ensures that the writes to a shared object are visible to all threads in the same order — thereby ruling out unpredictable behaviors. On the other hand, if there is (a) read of a shared object/variable v by at least one thread, (b) write of v by at least one thread and (c)