2015/02/24 by Ahmed Bouajjani, Bouajjani, Ahmed, Michael Emmi +5 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Formal Methods in Verification #Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO) #Security and Verification in Computing
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1502.06882
openalex publication_date 2015/02/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Efficient implementations of atomic objects such as concurrent stacks and queues are especially susceptible to programming errors, and necessitate automatic verification. Unfortunately their correctness criteria - linearizability with respect to given ADT specifications - are hard to verify. Even on classes of implementations where the usual temporal safety properties like control-state reachability are decidable, linearizability is undecidable. In this work we demonstrate that verifying linearizability for certain fixed ADT specifications is reducible to control-state reachability, despite being harder for arbitrary ADTs. We effectuate this reduction for several of the most popular atomic objects. This reduction yields the first decidability results for verification without bounding the number of concurrent threads. Furthermore, it enables the application of existing safety-verification tools to linearizability verification.