Bringing Iris into the Verified Software Toolchain

Abstract: The Verified Software Toolchain (VST) is a system for proving correctness of C programs using separation logic. By connecting to the verified compiler CompCert, it produces the strongest possible guarantees of correctness for real C code that we can compile and run. VST included concurrency from its inception, in the form of reasoning about lock invariants, but concurrent separation logic (CSL) has advanced by leaps and bounds since then. In this paper, we describe efforts to integrate advancements from Iris, a state-of-the-art mechanized CSL, into VST. Some features of Iris (ghost state and invariants) are re-implemented in VST from the ground up; others (Iris Proof Mode) are imported from the Iris development; still others (proof rules for atomic operations) are axiomatized, with the hope that they will be made foundational in future versions. The result is a system that can prove correctness of sophisticated concurrent programs implemented in C, with fine-grained locking and non-blocking atomic operations, that yields varying soundness guarantees depending on the features used.