Isla is a symbolic execution engine for
, as well as an anagram.
It can be used to evaluate the relaxed-memory behavior of instruction set architectures specified in Sail, using an axiomatic memory model specified in a subset of the cat language used by the herd7 tools. For example:
It can also be used for test generation, generating simplified semantics (summaries) for concrete opcodes, as well as many other possible use cases.
Currently tested with (stable) Rust 1.39:
cargo build --release
By default we require that z3 is
available as a shared library. On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and above this
should be available by just running apt install z3. However the
version of z3 that is available in older Ubuntu LTS versions (and
likely other linux distros) is quite old, so you may experience link
errors in that case. The build.rs script is configured so it can use a
libz3.so shared library placed in the root directory of this
repository. If this is done then LD_LIBRARY_PATH must also be set when
executing so that the more recent z3 library is used.
Alternatively, you can run
ISLA_STATIC_Z3=y cargo build --release
and it will build an executable with z3 statically linked, by checking
out and building an appropriate version of z3 as a static library. See
the vendor.sh and build.rs scripts for how this is done. This will
take a long time however!
Isla interprets IR produced by Sail. To generate this IR in the
correct format a tool is available in the isla-sail
directory. Building this requires various arcane OCaml incantations,
but mostly one can follow the Sail install guide
here,
followed by the instructions here. It will only
work with the latest HEAD of the sail2branch in the Sail repository.
For litmus tests in the .litmus format used by
herd7 there is another OCaml
tool based on parsing code from herd7 itself in the isla-litmus
directory, which translates that format into a simple
TOML representation. This OCaml
program is standalone and does not depend on any libraries, and should
build with dune >= 1.2.
isla-lib Is a Rust library which contains the core symbolic execution engine and an API to interact with it.
isla-axiomatic Contains rust code to handle various aspects which are specific to checking axiomatic concurrency models on top of isla-lib, such as parsing litmus tests, analysing instruction footprints, and defining a high-level interface to run litmus tests.
isla-cat Is a translator from (a fragment of) the cat memory models used by herdtools into SMTLIB definitions. It has its own README here.
isla-litmus Is an (optional) OCaml utility that maps the
.litmus files that herdtools uses into a format we can read.
isla-sail Is an (optional) OCaml utility that maps Sail specifications into the IR we can symbolically execute.
web Contains a server and client for a web interface to the axiomatic concurrency tool
src Defines multiple small executable utilities based on isla-lib
This software was developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (Department of Computer Science and Technology), in part under DARPA/AFRL contract FA8650-18-C-7809 ("CIFV"), in part funded by EPSRC Programme Grant EP/K008528/1 "REMS: Rigorous Engineering for Mainstream Systems", and in part funded from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 789108, "ELVER").