Construction and Analysis of Distributed Processes
Software Tools for Designing Reliable Protocols and Systems

THE CADP NEWSLETTER - Nr. 9
January 19, 2017

This newsletter is available from the CADP Home page.


Contents

1. Progress of CADP during year 2016

This page summarizes the recent evolution of the CADP toolbox from the point of view of its community of users and software developers. Other results, including scientific advances, publications, applications of CADP to industrial problems, and new prototype tools built on top of CADP can be found in the yearly activity report of the CONVECS team.

In 2016, the development of CADP has steadily progressed. Following the monthly rolling-release model established in 2013, twelve versions of CADP have been released in 2016. From version 2016-a to version 2017-a, 39 bugs have been fixed and 83 improvements have been brought.

The diagram to the right gives the repartition of efforts between the various components of CADP. Effort was not measured in time but in the number of lines of the HISTORY file, based on the reasonable assumption that the more involved a change, the more lines needed to describe it.

2. Overview of main enhancements

This section summarizes the main enhancements in the various components of CADP. For more details, please refer to the CADP change list and to the HISTORY file provided in the CADP distribution.
BCG

The conventions for string notations to represent "raw" values (i.e., values whose type is not a predefined one, but a custom type defined by the user) have improved, together with the associated conversion algorithms for reading/writing raw values from/to strings. The BCG_WRITE manual page has been updated to more accurately describe how label fields of type "raw" are parsed. The behaviour of the functions bcg_character_scan(), bcg_string_scan(), bcg_real_scan(), and bcg_raw_scan() has been carefully revised, and all the BCG libraries and tools (especially BCG_IO) have been modified to follow the new conventions and emit better diagnostics when label fields contain incorrect notations of raw values. Also, BCG_IO can now convert very long execution sequences into SEQ or LOTOS files without causing stack overflow.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2208 #2209 #2211 #2214 #2215 #2248 #2265 #2266.

CAESAR and CAESAR.ADT

Following the writing of the new CADP manual page for LOTOS, the front-end of CAESAR and CAESAR.ADT was carefully inspected, which led to various bug fixes regarding type signatures, error messages for overloaded functions, renaming/actualization of sorts and operations, equations for renamed operations, C-language reserved keywords, implementation of numeral sorts, and iterators over these sorts. Another bug was fixed for the "-external" option of CAESAR and a new "-numeral" option was introduced.

Also, the C identifiers automatically generated by CAESAR.ADT for sorts, operations, tester and selector macros have been simplified. So doing, the size of the C code generated by CAESAR.ADT was reduced by 4,73% (measured on 3.2 gigabytes of generated C code). As the new conventions are not backward compatible, the UPC migration tool was extended to ease transitioning the existing LOTOS and C files.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2179 #2180 #2190 #2220 #2222 #2223 #2224 #2226 #2229 #2231 #2232 #2233 #2234 #2235 #2236 #2243 #2244.

CAESAR.BDD

The CAESAR.BDD tool that analyzes NUPN (Nested-Unit Petri Nets) models and serves to prepare the yearly Model Checking Contest has been enhanced with two new options "-initial-places" and "-initial-tokens". It now properly handles the case where the initial marking contains more than 2^31 tokens. The output of the "-mcc" option has been made more precise when the NUPN under study is conservative or sub-conservative.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2155 #2163 #2164 #2165 #2167.

DEMOS

The demo 12 (Message Authentication Algorithm) and demo 31 (SCSI-2 bus arbitration protocol) have been manually translated from LOTOS to LNT. Additionally, demo 12 has been deeply revised by simplifying its LOTOS, LNT, and C code, by taking advantage of the imperative-programming features of LNT, and by enriching the LNT specification with the test cases contained in the original MAA description. This allowed to detect and correct a mistake in the C code implementing function HIGH_MUL(). Other CADP demos (namely demos 05, 16, 19, and 36) have also been simplified and/or enhanced in various ways.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2158 #2160 #2161 #2162 #2176 #2193 #2263 #2272 #2273 #2274.

DOC

Sustained effort was made to improve the documentation of the CADP toolbox. Various corrections have been brought to the CADP manual pages. A 27-page manual page explaining how the LOTOS language is implemented has been written, and the manual pages of the CAESAR and CAESAR.ADT compilers have been also updated. To make documentation more readable, the EVALUATOR3, and EVALUATOR4 manual pages have been splitted each in two pages, so as to better distinguish between the languages (namely, MCL3 and MCL) and their associated model checkers. The CADP distribution has been made leaner by keeping only the essential papers, and the "publications" and "tutorial" pages of the CADP web site have been enriched and reorganized.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2157 #2171 #2175 #2177 #2178 #2181 #2182 #2183 #2191 #2192 #2202 #2219 #2252.

EXP

The parallel composition operator "par" of the EXP language has been extended in several ways. From now on, local synchronization interfaces have the same syntax as global synchronization interfaces and accept synchronization degrees of the form #N. Also, synchronization degrees #0 and #1 have been added to, respectively, prevent a given gate from being fired or explicitly indicate that a given gate is not synchronised. A bug in EXP.OPEN has been fixed and better messages are now emitted to warn about dubious usage of the "par" operator.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2169 #2203 #2204 #2205 #2212.

LNT

In 2016, the long-term effort to enhance the LNT language and its tools has been pursued. LNT has been enriched with a new statement "use X" that suppresses compiler warnings when a variable X is assigned but not used. The syntax of LNT expressions has been modified so that field selections ("E.X"), field updates ("E1.{X = E2}"), and array accesses ("E1 [E2]") can now be freely combined without extra parentheses. LNT programs can now import predefined libraries, and two such libraries (BIT.lnt and OCTET.lnt) have been introduced.

A move towards "safer" LNT exceptions has started. The syntax for exceptions in function declarations has been modified and the semantics of LNT has shifted from "unchecked" to "checked" exceptions: exception parameters, if any, must be explicitly mentioned when a function is called. Such exception parameters can now be passed using either the named style or the positional style.

A few static-semantics constraints have been relaxed; for instance, it is no longer required that actual gate parameters be different when calling a process. Various bugs have been fixed. Several error/warning messages have been made more precise, and the format of LNT error/warning messages has been aligned on that of GCC. Finally, the LNT2LOTOS Reference Manual has been updated and enhanced.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2154 #2156 #2159 #2166 #2170 #2173 #2194 #2201 #2217 #2218 #2225 #2228 #2230 #2230 #2241 #2242 #2245 #2251 #2269 #2270 #2271 #2275.

NETWORK

The code of the "caesar_network_1" library, which is a building block for the distributed verification tools of CADP, has been carefully scrutinized and split into five logically-independent modules. Nine problems have been detected and solved, among which a flaw in the distributed termination algorithm: the entire network could freeze if a worker process crashed too early, before the opening of TCP sockets. From now on, a better distributed termination algorithm is used, which supports the coexistence of several networks, ensures that all connections are closed before terminating, and produces more informative traces indicating which worker has triggered termination. Also, the improved "caesar_network_1" library checks that all workers operate in directories that are pairwise distinct, mutually disjoint, and different from the working directory of the coordinator process.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2195 #2216 #2258 #2259 #2260 #2264 #2268.

SVL

The SVL language has been extended to include the generalized parallel composition operator with synchronization degrees in synchronization interfaces that has been recently introduced in EXP.OPEN. Two bugs have also been corrected.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2168 #2213 #2255.

MISC

Enhancements and bug fixes have been brought to other CADP components, including CADP_MEMORY, EUCALYPTUS, INSTALLATOR, OCIS, RFL, TST, and XTL. The style files for the various editors supported by CADP have been updated to take into account the recent features added to LNT. The predefined MCL libraries of the EVALUATOR model checker have been modified to generate more explanatory diagnostics for the inevitability operators.

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2184 #2187 #2188 #2207 #2221 #2227 #2237 #2238 #2240 #2246 #2247 #2249 #2250 #2262 #2267.

PORTS

Although CADP is mostly used on Linux, specific effort has been made to target other execution platforms. Concerning macOS: CADP now supports the recent versions 10.10 ("Yosemite"), 10.11 ("El Capitan"), and 10.12 ("Sierra"). Concerning Windows: changes have been brought to support Windows 10 and the 64-bit version of Cygwin (previously, only the 32-bit version was supported). Other adaptations were required to handle the recent versions of Cygwin packages, MinGW C compiler, and Mintty shell, as well as the case where Cygwin is not installed in "C:\", but in either "C:\Cygwin" or "C:\Cygwin64".

For details, see HISTORY entries: #2172 #2174 #2185 #2186 #2189 #2196 #2197 #2198 #2199 #2200 #2206 #2210 #2253 #2254 #2256 #2257 #2261.

3. Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful to the following scientists, who provided us with valuable feedback and advice about the use of CADP:

and all other persons we may forget.


Back to the CADP Home Page