Mechanical Verification of Transactional Memories with Non-transactional Memory Accesses

Transactional memory is a programming abstraction intended to simplify the synchronization of conflicting memory accesses (by concurrent threads) without the difficulties associated with locks. In a previous work we presented a formal framework for proving that a transactional memory implementation satisfies its specifications and provided with model checking verification of some using small instantiations. This paper extends the previous work to capture non-transactional accesses to memory, which occurs, for example, when using legacy code. We provide a mechanical proof of the soundness of the verification method, as well as a mechanical verification of a version of the popular tcc implementation that includes non-transactional memory accesses. The verification is performed by the deductive temporal checker tlpvs .