Uniform or near-uniform generation of solutions for large satisfiability formulas is a problem of theoretical and practical interest for the testing community. Recent works proposed two algorithms (namely UniGen and QuickSampler) for reaching a good compromise between execution time and uniformity guarantees, with empirical evidence on SAT benchmarks. In the context of highly-configurable software systems (e.g., Linux), it is unclear whether UniGen and QuickSampler can scale and sample uniform software configurations. In this paper, we perform a thorough experiment on 128 real-world feature models. We find that UniGen is unable to produce SAT solutions out of such feature models. Furthermore, we show that QuickSampler does not generate uniform samples and that some features are either never part of the sample or too frequently present. Finally, using a case study, we characterize the impacts of these results on the ability to find bugs in a configurable system. Overall, our results suggest that we are not there: more research is needed to explore the cost-effectiveness of uniform sampling when testing large configurable systems.
Array constraints are essential for handling data structures in automated reasoning and software verification. Unfortunately, the use of a typical finite domain (FD) solver based on local consistencybased filtering has strong limitations when constraints on indexes are combined with constraints on array elements and size. This paper proposes an efficient and complete FD-solving technique for extended constraints over (possibly unbounded) arrays. We describe a simple but particularly powerful transformation for building an equisatisfiable formula that can be efficiently solved using standard FD reasoning over arrays, even in the unbounded case. Experiments show that the proposed solver significantly outperforms FD solvers, and successfully competes with the best SMT-solvers.
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