Bounded verification techniques such as bounded model checking (BMC) have successfully been used for many practical program analysis problems, but concurrency still poses a challenge. Here, we describe a new approach to BMC of sequentially consistent imperative programs that use POSIX threads. We first translate the multi-threaded program into a nondeterministic sequential program that preserves reachability for all round-robin schedules with a given bound on the number of rounds. We then reuse existing high-performance BMC tools as backends for the sequential verification problem. Our translation is carefully designed to introduce very small memory overheads and very few sources of nondeterminism, so it produces tight SAT/SMT formulae, and is thus very effective in practice: Our Lazy-CSeq tool implementing this translation for the C programming language won several gold and silver medals in the concurrency category of the Software Verification Competitions (SV-COMP) 2014–2021 and was able to find errors in programs where all other techniques (including testing) failed. In this article, we give a detailed description of our translation and prove its correctness, sketch its implementation using the CSeq framework, and report on a detailed evaluation and comparison of our approach.

Lazy sequentialization is one of the most effective approaches for the bounded verification of concurrent programs. Existing tools assume sequential consistency (SC), thus the feasibility of lazy sequentializations for weak memory models (WMMs) remains untested. Here, we describe the first lazy sequentialization approach for the total store order (TSO) and partial store order (PSO) memory models. We replace all shared memory accesses with operations on a shared memory abstraction (SMA), an abstract data type that encapsulates the semantics of the underlying WMM and implements it under the simpler SC model. We give efficient SMA implementations for TSO and PSO that are based on temporal circular doubly-linked lists, a new data structure that allows an efficient simulation of the store buffers. We show experimentally, both on the SV-COMP concurrency benchmarks and a real world instance, that this approach works well in combination with lazy sequentialization on top of bounded model checking.