Specifying and Verifying Persistent Libraries

We present a general framework for specifying and verifying persistent libraries, that is, libraries of data structures that provide some persistency guarantees upon a failure of the machine they are executing on. Our framework enables modular reasoning about the correctness of individual libraries (horizontal and vertical compositionality) and is general enough to encompass all existing persistent library specifications ranging from hardware architectural specifications to correctness conditions such as durable linearizability. As case studies, we specify the FliT and Mirror libraries, verify their implementations over Px86, and use them to build higher-level durably linearizable libraries, all within our framework. We also specify and verify a persistent transaction library that highlights some of the technical challenges which are specific to persistent memory compared to weak memory and how they are handled by our framework.