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Formal verification of a realistic compiler Xavier Leroy To cite this version: Xavier Leroy. Formal verification of a realistic compiler. Communications of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, 2009, 52 (7), pp.107-115. 10.1145/1538788.1538814. inria-00415861 HAL Id: inria-00415861 https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00415861 Submitted on 11 Sep 2009 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Formal verification of a realistic compiler Xavier Leroy INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt Domaine de Voluceau, B.P. 105, 78153 Le Chesnay, France [email protected] Abstract of techniques to alleviate them, such as conducting manual This paper reports on the development and formal verifica- code reviews of the generated assembly code after having tion (proof of semantic preservation) of CompCert, a com- turned all compiler optimizations off. These techniques piler from Clight (a large subset of the C programming lan- do not fully address the issues, and are costly in terms of guage) to PowerPC assembly code, using the Coq proof as- development time and program performance. sistant both for programming the compiler and for proving An obviously better approach is to apply formal methods its correctness. Such a verified compiler is useful in the con- to the compiler itself in order to gain assurance that it pre- text of critical software and its formal verification: the veri- serves the semantics of the source programs. For the last fication of the compiler guarantees that the safety properties five years, we have been working on the development of a proved on the source code hold for the executable compiled realistic, verified compiler called CompCert. By verified, we code as well. mean a compiler that is accompanied by a machine-checked proof of a semantic preservation property: the generated machine code behaves as prescribed by the semantics of the 1. Introduction source program. By realistic, we mean a compiler that could Can you trust your compiler? Compilers are generally realistically be used in the context of production of critical assumed to be semantically transparent: the compiled software. Namely, it compiles a language commonly used code should behave as prescribed by the semantics of the for critical embedded software: neither Java nor ML nor source program. Yet, compilers—and especially optimizing assembly code, but a large subset of the C language. It compilers—are complex programs that perform complicated produces code for a processor commonly used in embedded symbolic transformations. Despite intensive testing, bugs systems: we chose the PowerPC because it is popular in in compilers do occur, causing the compilers to crash at avionics. Finally, the compiler must generate code that is compile-time or—much worse—to silently generate an efficient enough and compact enough to fit the requirements incorrect executable for a correct source program. of critical embedded systems. This implies a multi-pass com- For low-assurance software, validated only by testing, piler that features good register allocation and some basic the impact of compiler bugs is low: what is tested is the optimizations. executable code produced by the compiler; rigorous testing Proving the correctness of a compiler is by no ways a should expose compiler-introduced errors along with errors new idea: the first such proof was published in 1967 [16] already present in the source program. Note, however, (for the compilation of arithmetic expressions down to stack that compiler-introduced bugs are notoriously difficult to machine code) and mechanically verified in 1972 [17]. Since expose and track down. The picture changes dramatically then, many other proofs have been conducted, ranging from for safety-critical, high-assurance software. Here, validation single-pass compilers for toy languages to sophisticated code by testing reaches its limits and needs to be complemented optimizations [8]. In the CompCert experiment, we carry or even replaced by the use of formal methods such as this line of work all the way to end-to-end verification of a model checking, static analysis, and program proof. Almost complete compilation chain from a structured imperative universally, these formal verification tools are applied to language down to assembly code through 8 intermediate the source code of a program. Bugs in the compiler used to languages. While conducting the verification of CompCert, turn this formally verified source code into an executable we found that many of the non-optimizing translations per- can potentially invalidate all the guarantees so painfully formed, while often considered obvious in the compiler lit- obtained by the use of formal methods. In a future where erature, are surprisingly tricky to formally prove correct. formal methods are routinely applied to source programs, This paper gives a high-level overview of the CompCert the compiler could appear as a weak link in the chain that compiler and its mechanized verification, which uses the Coq goes from specifications to executables. The safety-critical proof assistant [7, 3]. This compiler, classically, consists of software industry is aware of these issues and uses a variety two parts: a front-end translating the Clight subset of C to Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for a low-level, structured intermediate language called Cminor, personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are and a lightly-optimizing back-end generating PowerPC as- not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies sembly code from Cminor. A detailed description of Clight bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific can be found in [5]; of the compiler front-end in [4]; and of permission and/or a fee. the compiler back-end in [11, 13]. The complete source code Copyright 2008 ACM 0001-0782/08/0X00 ...$5.00. of the Coq development, extensively commented, is available exists exactly one behavior B such that S ⇓ B, and simi- on the Web [12]. larly for C. In this case, it is easy to prove that property (2) The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Sec- is equivalent to: tion 2 compares and formalizes several approaches to estab- ∀B/∈ Wrong,S ⇓ B =⇒ C ⇓ B (3) lishing trust in the results of compilation. Section 3 de- scribes the structure of the CompCert compiler, its perfor- (Here, Wrong is the set of “going wrong” behaviors.) Prop- mance, and how the Coq proof assistant was used not only erty (3) is generally much easier to prove than property (2), to prove its correctness but also to program most of it. By since the proof can proceed by induction on the execution lack of space, we will not detail the formal verification of of S. This is the approach that we take in this work. every compilation pass. However, section 4 provides a tech- From a formal methods perspective, what we are really nical overview of such a verification for one crucial pass of interested in is whether the compiled code satisfies the func- the compiler: register allocation. Finally, section 5 presents tional specifications of the application. Assume that these preliminary conclusions and directions for future work. specifications are given as a predicate Spec(B) of the observ- able behavior. We say that C satisfies the specifications, 2. Approaches to trusted compilation and write C |= Spec, if C cannot go wrong (C safe) and all behaviors of B satisfy Spec (∀B, C ⇓ B =⇒ Spec(B)). 2.1 Notions of semantic preservation The expected correctness property of the compiler is that it preserves the fact that the source code S satisfies the specifi- Consider a source program S and a compiled program C cation, a fact that has been established separately by formal produced by a compiler. Our aim is to prove that the seman- verification of S: tics of S was preserved during compilation. To make this notion of semantic preservation precise, we assume given se- S |= Spec =⇒ C |= Spec (4) mantics for the source and target languages that associate It is easy to show that property (2) implies property (4) for observable behaviors B to S and C. We write S ⇓ B to all specifications Spec. Therefore, establishing property (2) mean that program S executes with observable behavior B. once and for all spares us from establishing property (4) for The behaviors we observe in CompCert include termination, every specification of interest. divergence, and “going wrong” (invoking an undefined oper- A special case of property (4), of considerable historical ation that could crash, such as accessing an array out of importance, is the preservation of type and memory safety, bounds). In all cases, behaviors also include a trace of the which we can summarize as “if S does not go wrong, neither input-output operations (system calls) performed during the does C”: execution of the program. Behaviors therefore reflect accu- rately what the user of the program, or more generally the S safe =⇒ C safe (5) outside world the program interacts with, can observe. Combined with a separate check that S is well-typed in a The strongest notion of semantic preservation during com- sound type system, property (5) implies that C executes pilation is that the source program S and the compiled without memory violations.

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