JPF core

jpf-core

This is the basis for all JPF projects, i.e. you always need to install it. jpf-core contains the basic VM and model checking infrastructure, and can be used to check for concurrency defects like deadlocks, and unhandled exceptions like NullPointerExceptions and AssertionErrors.

Repository

The Mercurial repository is on http://babelfish.arc.nasa.gov/hg/jpf/jpf-core

Properties

jpf-core supports two rather generic properties, which are configured by default:

gov.nasa.jpf.jvm.NoUncaughtExceptionsProperty
gov.nasa.jpf.jvm.NotDeadlockedProperty

There is no need to parameterize any of them. NoUncaughtExceptionsProperty covers all Throwable objects that are not handled within the application, i.e. would terminate the process.

Some of the listeners (like PreciseRaceDetector) are ListenerAdapter instances, i.e. work as more specific Property implementations.

Listeners

jpf-core includes a variety of listeners that fall into three major categories:

program properties
execution monitoring
execution control

Some of the main listeners are

Properties

jpf-core uses many JPF properties, you can find most of them in the defaults.properties file. The following ones are of interest for users

listener - a comma separated list of class names representing listeners that should be automatically instantiated and registered during JPF startup
listener.autoload - a comma separated list of annotation types. If JPF encounters such an annotation in one of the analyzed classes at runtime, it automatically loads and registered the associated listener
listener.<annotation-type> - class name of the listener associated with <annotation-type>
vm.insn_factory.class - class name of a BytecodeInstructionFactory, e.g. to switch to the symbolic execution mode or to use specific bytecode implementations for checking numeric properties
vm.halt_on_throw (true|false) - tells JPF if it should try to find a handler if it encounters an exception in the analyzed program (useful to avoid masking exceptions within handlers)
cg.randomize_choices (random|path|def) - tells JPF if it should randomize the order of choices for each ChoiceGenerator, to avoid degenerated searches (e.g. always indexing with the main thread in scheduling choices).
report.console.property_violation - comma separated list of topics that should be printed by JPF if it detects an error. Possible values include
- error error description
- snapshot thread stacks
- trace instruction/statement trace (can be long and memory-expensive)