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Modular verification of preemptive OS kernels

Part of: JFP Research Articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2013

ALEXEY GOTSMAN  and
HONGSEOK YANG
ALEXEY GOTSMAN
Affiliation:
IMDEA Software Institute (e-mail: alexey.gotsman@imdea.org)
HONGSEOK YANG
Affiliation:
University of Oxford (e-mail: Hongseok.Yang@cs.ox.ac.uk)
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Abstract

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Most major OS kernels today run on multiprocessor systems and are preemptive: it is possible for a process running in the kernel mode to get descheduled. Existing modular techniques for verifying concurrent code are not directly applicable in this setting: they rely on scheduling being implemented correctly, and in a preemptive kernel, the correctness of the scheduler is interdependent with the correctness of the code it schedules. This interdependency is even stronger in mainstream kernels, such as those of Linux, FreeBSD or Mac OS X, where the scheduler and processes interact in complex ways. We propose the first logic that is able to decompose the verification of preemptive multiprocessor kernel code into verifying the scheduler and the rest of the kernel separately, even in the presence of complex interdependencies between the two components. The logic hides the manipulation of control by the scheduler when reasoning about preemptable code and soundly inherits proof rules from concurrent separation logic to verify it thread-modularly. We illustrate the power of our logic by verifying an example scheduler, which includes some of the key features of the scheduler from Linux 2.6.11 challenging for verification.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Functional Programming , Volume 23 , Issue 4: ICFP 2011 , July 2013 , pp. 452 - 514
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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