Verifying Safety and Liveness for the FlexTM Hybrid Transactional Memory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider the verification of safety (strict serializability and abort consistency) and liveness (obstruction and livelock freedom) for the hybrid transactional memory framework FlexTM. This framework allows for flexible implementations of transactional memories based on an adaptation of the MESI coherence protocol. FlexTM allows for both eager and lazy conflict resolution strategies. Like in the case of Software Transactional Memories, the verification problem is not trivial as the number of concurrent transactions, their size, and the number of accessed shared variables cannot be a priori bounded. This complexity is exacerbated by aspects that are specific to hardware and hybrid transactional memories. Our work takes into account intricate behaviours such as cache line based conflict detection, false sharing, invisible reads or non-transactional instructions. We carry out the first automatic verification of a hybrid transactional memory and establish, by adopting a small model approach, challenging properties such as strict serializability, abort consistency, and obstruction freedom for both an eager and a lazy conflict resolution strategies. We also detect an example that refutes livelock freedom. To achieve this, our prototype tool makes use of the latest antichain based techniques to handle systems with tens of thousands of states.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".