audit-state-machine
Testing & QualityAudit explicit state machines (drain status, node lifecycle, async-value lifecycle) for illegal or missed transitions
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Audit the cache's explicit state machines for illegal transitions, missed transitions (lost wakeups), and ABA across transitions. The snapshot audits trace fields and methods one at a time; this one builds the full transition table for each machine and asks whether every reachable interleaving keeps the machine legal. A missed transition wedges the cache (work buffered, never drained); an illegal transition resurrects a dead node or strands a future.
The drain/maintenance path was recently changed ("assist maintenance directly when the write buffer is full"), so Machine 1 is the priority.
Machine 1: Drain status (priority)
States: IDLE, REQUIRED, PROCESSING_TO_IDLE, PROCESSING_TO_REQUIRED.
Transition sites: afterWrite, scheduleAfterWrite, scheduleDrainBuffers,
maintenance, rescheduleCleanUpIfIncomplete, performCleanUp. Access via
drainStatusOpaque/drainStatusAcquire, casDrainStatus,
setDrainStatusOpaque/setDrainStatusRelease.
Build the table: for each (state, event) pair — a write arrives, a read arrives, maintenance starts/ends, the pacer fires, the executor rejects, the buffer-full inline-assist path runs — what is the next state and who drives it? Then attack:
- Lost wakeup: can the machine settle in
IDLEwhile work remains buffered? Trace the maintenance-exit CAS (PROCESSING_TO_IDLE → IDLE) against a concurrentscheduleAfterWritethat observedPROCESSING_TO_IDLEand CAS'd it toPROCESSING_TO_REQUIRED. Which write loses, and does the fallback (setDrainStatusOpaque(REQUIRED)) re-arm it? - Double schedule: can two threads both schedule maintenance for the same epoch, or the inline-assist path run concurrently with an executor-scheduled drain?
- Opaque vs CAS staleness: reads are opaque, transitions are CAS/release. For every
decision that gates scheduling, can the opaque read be stale in a way that drops a
reschedule? Verify the
PROCESSING_TO_IDLE → PROCESSING_TO_REQUIREDCAS and the maintenance-exit re-check close the window on all paths. - Pacer coupling:
rescheduleCleanUpIfIncompletegates onREQUIRED && !pacer.isScheduled(). CanREQUIREDcoexist with no scheduled pacer and no in-flight maintenance — i.e. the cache wedged until the next user operation happens to drive it?
Machine 2: Node lifecycle
States: alive (has value) → retired (marked) → dead (unlinked). Strictly
unidirectional. Sites: makeDead, the retire paths, isAlive/isRetired/isDead
(on the generated Node), and the resurrect path in remap/compute.
- Can any path move
dead → retired,dead → alive, orretired → aliveexcept the sanctioned resurrection (which re-creates within the samesynchronized(node))? Resurrection that observes a node already made dead is the bug to hunt. - On every exception or early-return in the compute and eviction paths, does the node
land in a legal terminal state — never stuck
retiredwith no one left to finishmakeDead? - Is weight / region accounting applied exactly once per transition — not twice on a retried path, not zero on an exception path?
Machine 3: Async-value lifecycle
An async entry's value is an incomplete future → completes (value | null | exception).
Sites: isComputingAsync, ASYNC_EXPIRY, refreshes(), the refresh bit in
writeTime (& 1L).
- Can an entry be treated as both computing-async and expired/evicted in a way that
strands the future or the
ASYNC_EXPIRYtimestamp? (Historical: timestamp stuck after executor rejection.) - The refresh-in-progress bit in
writeTimeand therefreshes()map: can they disagree — bit set but map entry gone, or vice versa — so a refresh is double-started or never cleared?
Output
For each finding: the interleaving (thread-by-thread), the illegal or missed transition, the observable consequence (wedged cache, lost notification, stranded future, resurrected dead node), and a Verification. Verify each interleaving is JMM-legal, not merely sequentially consistent. If a transition cannot be resolved statically, ESCALATE with a Fray skeleton — the drain machine is a prime Fray target.