Chapter 4. Verification of Concurrent Programs

The previous chapters have shown that concurrent programs can have subtle errors, that the errors cannot be discovered by debugging and that corrections cannot be checked by testing. For this reason, formal specification and verification of correctness properties are far more important for concurrent programs than they are for sequential programs. In this chapter we will explore several such methods.

We begin with a short section on the specification of correctness properties and then present the most important technique for proving properties, inductive proofs of invariants. This technique is used to prove that mutual exclusion holds for the third attempt. Inductive proofs are easy to carry out once ...

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