Compositional verification of termination-preserving refinement of concurrent programs
Hongjin Liang, Xinyu Feng, Zhong Shao · 2014
Many verification problems can be reduced to refinement verification. However, existing work on verifying refinement of concurrent programs either fails to prove the preservation of termination, allowing a diverging program to trivially refine any programs, or is difficult to apply in compositional thread-local reasoning. In this paper, we first propose a new simulation technique, which establishes termination-preserving refinement and is a congruence with respect to parallel composition. We then give a proof theory for the simulation, which is the first Hoare-style concurrent program logic supporting termination-preserving refinement proofs. We show two key applications of our logic, i.e., verifying linearizability and lock-freedom together for fine-grained concurrent objects, and verifying full correctness of optimizations of concurrent algorithms.