Sequential verification of serializability

H. Attiya, G. Ramalingam, N. Rinetzky
2010 Proceedings of the 37th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '10  
Serializability is a commonly used correctness condition in concurrent programming. When a concurrent module is serializable, certain other properties of the module can be verified by considering only its sequential executions. In many cases, concurrent modules guarantee serializability by using standard locking protocols, such as tree locking or two-phase locking. Unfortunately, according to the existing literature, verifying that a concurrent module adheres to these protocols requires
more » ... ing concurrent interleavings. In this paper, we show that adherence to a large class of locking protocols (including tree locking and two-phase locking) can be verified by considering only sequential executions. The main consequence of our results is that in many cases, the (manual or automatic) verification of serializability can itself be done using sequential reasoning.
doi:10.1145/1706299.1706305 dblp:conf/popl/AttiyaRR10 fatcat:4wzxngnzh5bkddrek3he6kn2vu