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arXiv · 1511.00184

Pointer Race Freedom

Frédéric Haziza·Lukáš Holík·Roland Meyer·Sebastian Wolff
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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 accessor's 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.

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Frédéric Haziza, Lukáš Holík, Roland Meyer, Sebastian Wolff. 2015-11-11. Pointer Race Freedom. https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00184

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