Static Trace-Based Deadlock Analysis for Synchronous Mini-Go

Abstract

We consider the problem of static deadlock detection for programs in the Go programming language which make use of synchronous channel communications. In our analysis, regular expressions extended with a fork operator capture the communication behavior of a program. Starting from a simple criterion that characterizes traces of deadlock-free programs, we develop automata-based methods to check for deadlockfreedom. The approach is implemented and evaluated with a series of examples.

A static verification framework for message passing in Go using behavioural types

“…The time includes both communicating finite state machine extraction and their analysis, but does not include building the global graph and only checks for liveness. Columns 15-16 pertain to the gopherlyzer tool [40], which only checks for global deadlockfreedom (most programs had to be manually adjusted in order to be accepted by this tool -see § 7 for the severe practical limitations of the tool). Columns 17-19 refer to the GoInfer/Gong tool from [30].…”

“…A significant advantage of our approach over previous works [30,36,40] is that our inference procedure covers a much larger part of the Go language allowing for the automatic extraction of an accurate model of a program's concurrency-related features, resulting in a more precise analysis with reduced numbers of false alarms and undetected errors. Our integration with a general purpose model checker also enables us to modularly verify arbitrary safety and liveness properties, over the more single-minded nature of previously proposed techniques, as well as take advantage of advances in model checking to provide better performance scaling.…”

Bounded verification of message-passing concurrency in Go using Promela and Spin

“…• In Program 17 each goroutine may get stuck because of a mismatch between the number of send and receive actions. • Program 19 is an encoding of the (starving) philosopher problem using only two philosophers, taken from [14]. Program 20 is another encoding of the (starving) dining philosophers from [8].…”

“…Their work does not support asynchronous channels nor programs that spawn goroutines or create channels in loops or conditionals. Stadtmüller et al introduced gopherlyzer [14] which detects global deadlocks using forkable regular expressions. This work does not support channel closures, asynchronous channels, nor goroutines spawned in loops.…”

“…Note that this program spawns |files| threads and creates a channel whose capacity is |files|. The length of files is unknown at compile-time, hence this program cannot be checked for concurrency errors with existing static verification techniques for Go [7,8,10,12,14].…”