Petrification: Software Model Checking for Programs with Dynamic Thread Management (Extended Version)

We address the verification problem for concurrent program that dynamically create (fork) new threads or destroy (join) existing threads. We present a reduction to the verification problem for concurrent programs with a fixed number of threads. More precisely, we present petrification, a transformation from programs with dynamic thread management to an existing, Petri net-based formalism for programs with a fixed number of threads. Our approach is implemented in a software model checking tool for C programs that use the pthreads API.