Discovering Likely Program Invariants for Persistent Memory

We propose a method for automatically discovering likely program invariants for persistent memory (PM), which is a type of fast and byte-addressable storage device that can retain data after power loss. The invariants, also called PM properties or PM requirements, specify which objects of the progra...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering : [proceedings] pp. 1795 - 1807
Main Authors: Huang, Zunchen, Ravi, Srivatsan, Wang, Chao
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 27.10.2024
Subjects:
Benchmark testing
Codes
Cognition
Computer bugs
counterfactual reasoning
Data structures
dynamic analysis
Instruments
invariant generation
nonvolatile memory
Performance analysis
Software
Software engineering
Static analysis
ISSN:2643-1572
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We propose a method for automatically discovering likely program invariants for persistent memory (PM), which is a type of fast and byte-addressable storage device that can retain data after power loss. The invariants, also called PM properties or PM requirements, specify which objects of the program should be made persistent and in what order. Our method relies on a combination of static and dynamic analysis techniques. Specifically, it relies on static analysis to compute dependence relations between LOAD/STORE instructions and instruments the information into the executable program. Then, it relies on dynamic analysis of the execution traces and counterfactual reasoning to infer PM properties. With precisely computed dependence relations, the inferred properties are necessary conditions for the program to behave correctly through power loss and recovery; with imprecise dependence relations, these are likely program invariants. We have evaluated our method on benchmark programs including eight persistent data structures and two distributed storage applications, Redis and Memcached. The results show that our method can infer PM properties quickly and these properties are of higher quality than those inferred by a state-of-the-art technique. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the inferred properties by leveraging them for PM bug detection, which significantly improves the performance of a state-of-the-art PM bug detection technique.
ISSN:2643-1572
DOI:10.1145/3691620.3695544