Recent research and bug reports have shown that work conservation, the property that a core is idle only if no other core is overloaded, is not guaranteed by Linux's CFS or FreeBSD's ULE multicore schedulers. Indeed, multicore schedulers are challenging to specify and verify: they must operate under stringent performance requirements, while handling very large numbers of concurrent operations on threads. As a consequence, the verification of correctness properties of schedulers has not yet been considered.

We extend term unification techniques used to type extensible records in order to solve the two main typing problems for modules in Standard ML: matching and sharing. We obtain a type system for modules based only on well known unification problems, modulo some equational theories we define. Our formalization is simple and has the elegance of polymorphic type disciplines based on unification. It can be seen as a synthesis of previous work on module and record typing.