TY  - GEN
A1  - Alglave, J
A1  - Maranget, L
A1  - McKenney, PE
A1  - Parri, A
A1  - Stern, A
CY  - Williamsburg, VA, USA
SP  - 405
EP  - 418
SN  - 1558-1160
ID  - discovery10070727
AV  - public
TI  - Frightening Small Children and Disconcerting Grown-ups: Concurrency in the Linux Kernel
N1  - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions.
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1145/3173162.3177156
Y1  - 2018/03/28/
N2  - Concurrency in the Linux kernel can be a contentious topic. The Linux kernel mailing list features numerous discussions related to consistency models, including those of the more than 30 CPU architectures supported by the kernel and that of the kernel itself. How are Linux programs supposed to behave? Do they behave correctly on exotic hardware? A formal model can help address such questions. Better yet, an executable model allows programmers to experiment with the model to develop their intuition. Thus we offer a model written in the cat language, making it not only formal, but also executable by the herd simulator. We tested our model against hardware and refined it in consultation with maintainers. Finally, we formalised the fundamental law of the Read-Copy-Update synchronisation mechanism, and proved that one of its implementations satisfies this law.
PB  - ACM
ER  -