Relaxed-memory concurrency and verified compilation

Jaroslav Ŝevčik, Viktor Vafeiadis, Francesco Zappa Nardelli, Suresh Jagannathan, Peter Sewell
2011 Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '11  
In this paper, we consider the semantic design and verified compilation of a C-like programming language for concurrent sharedmemory computation above x86 multiprocessors. The design of such a language is made surprisingly subtle by several factors: the relaxed-memory behaviour of the hardware, the effects of compiler optimisation on concurrent code, the need to support highperformance concurrent algorithms, and the desire for a reasonably simple programming model. In turn, this complexity
more » ... verified (or verifying) compilation both essential and challenging. We define a concurrent relaxed-memory semantics for ClightTSO, an extension of CompCert's Clight in which the processor's memory model is exposed for high-performance code. We discuss a strategy for verifying compilation from ClightTSO to x86, which we validate with correctness proofs (building on CompCert) for the most interesting compiler phases.
doi:10.1145/1926385.1926393 dblp:conf/popl/SevcikVNJS11 fatcat:o4p6zvhpqbhb5b4nte5w6afb6i