answers.tex
author Christian Urban <urbanc@in.tum.de>
Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:28:17 +0000
changeset 201 fcc6f4c3c32f
parent 200 ff826e28d85c
child 203 fe3dbfd9123b
permissions -rw-r--r--
updated

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{journal/pdfsetup}

\begin{document}

%%%%
% Reviewer 1.
\section*{Comments by Reviewer \#1}


\begin{itemize}
\item {\it 1.) I don't see the point of working with a more general
    library of possibly infinite graphs when it is clear that no
    (necessarily finite) evolution of the state could ever generate an
    infinite graph.}

  It seemed the most convenient approach for us and we added the following
  comment on page 8 about justifying our choice. There was already a
  comment about having finiteness as a property, rather than a built-in
  assumption.
  
  \begin{quote}
    It seems for our purposes the most convenient representation of
    graphs are binary relations given by sets of pairs. The pairs
    stand for the edges in graphs. This relation-based representation
    has the advantage that the notions \textit{waiting} and
    \textit{holding} are already defined in terms of relations
    amongst threads and resources.  Also, we can easily re-use the
    standard notions of transitive closure operations $\_*$ and $\_+$,
    as well as relation composition for our graphs.
  \end{quote}

\item {\it 2.) Later, the release function is defined using Hilbert
    choice (Isabelle/HOL's \texttt{SOME} function) as a method for emulating
    non-determinism. This is horrid. The highest level generation of
    traces handles non-determinism beautifully; using choice at a
    lower level lets you keep things functional, but hides the fact
    that you want to model non-determinism at the lower level as
    well. I agree that the final theorem does imply that the way in
    which the new waiting list is chosen is irrelevant, but this
    implication is only apparent through a close reading of that
    definition. Better I think to lift the non-determinism and make it
    more apparent at the top level.}

  \begin{quote}
    We generally agree with the reviewer about the use of
    \texttt{SOME}, but in this instance we cannot see a way to make
    this nondeterminism explicit without complicating  the
    topelevel rules about \textit{PIP} on page 12. By using
    \texttt{SOME}, we can leave implicit the order of the waiting
    queue returned by release (which corresponds to the original
    system call from Sha et al). If we represent the non-determinism
    explicitly, we would need to add another argument to $V$
    specifying which thread is the next one that obtains the lock and
    add another premise to the \textit{PIP} rule for ensuring that
    this thread is member of the waiting queue.
  \end{quote}

\item {\it 3.) In \S 4, there is an assumption made about the number of
    threads allowed to be created. Given the form of theorem 2, this
    seems to me to be unnecessary. It's certainly extremely weird and
    ugly because it says that there are at most BC many thread
    creation events in all possible future traces (of which there are
    of course infinitely many). \ldots}

  \begin{quote}
    We think this mis-reads our theorem: Although the constrains we
    put on thread creation prohibit the creation of higher priority
    threads, the creation of lower priority threads may still consume
    CPU time and prevent \textit{th} from accomplishing its task. That
    is the purpose we put in the \textit{BC} constraint to limit the
    overall number of thread creations. We slightly augmented the
    sentence on page 15 by:

    \begin{quote} 
    Otherwise our PIP scheduler could be ``swamped'' with
    \textit{Create}-requests of lower priority threads.
    \end{quote}
    \end{quote}

\item {\it Why are variables corresponding to resources given the name
    \textit{cs}? This is confusing. \textit{rsc} or \textit{r} would be
    better.}

  \begin{quote}
    \textit{cs} stands for ``critical section'', which is the original name
    used by Sha et al to represent ``critical resources''.
  \end{quote}

\item All other comments of the reviewer have been implemented.
  
\end{itemize}  

%%%%
% Reviever 2.
\section*{Comments by Reviewer \#2}

\begin{itemize}
\item {\it Well-founded comment:} We adpated the paragraph where
  \textit{acyclic} and \textit{well-founded} are used for the first
  time.

  \begin{quote}
    Note that forests can have trees with infinte depth and containing
    nodes with infinitely many children.  A \emph{finite forest} is a
    forest whose underlying relation is well-founded and every node
    has finitely many children (is only finitely branching).
  

    We also added a footnote that we are using the standard definition of
    well-foundedness from Isabelle.
  \end{quote}

\item {\it Comment about graph-library:} This point was also raised by
  Reviewer~\#1 and we gave a better justification on page 8 (see
  answer to first point of Reviewer~\#1).


\item {\it 20.) In the case of "Set th prio:", it is not declared what
    the cprec (e::s) th should be (presumably it is something like
    Max((prio,|s|),prec th s) or possibly just prec th (e::s) given
    the assumptions on Set events listed before).}

  \begin{quote}
    We note the concern of the reviewer about the effect of the
  Set-operation on the \textit{cprec} value of a thread. According to
  equation (6) on page 11, the \textit{cprec} of a thread is
  determined by the precedence values in its subtree, while the Set
  operation only changes the precedence of the `Set' thread. If the
  reviewer thinks we should add this explanation again, then we are
  happy to do so.
  \end{quote}

\end{itemize}

\section*{Comments by Reviewer \#3}

\begin{itemize}
\item {\it The verification is at the model level, instead of code level:...}

  \begin{quote}
    The verification is indeed on the level of the algorithm. A
    verification of the C-code is *well* beyond the scope of the
    paper. For example, it would requie a formalised semantics for C
    (as for example given in the seL4-project). This and interfacing
    with it would be a tremendous amount of work and we are not sure
    whether their results would actally sufficient for the code we
    wrote.

    In light of this, we have made it clearer in the abstract and in a
    footnote on the first page that our C-code is unverified. Additionally
    we added the following sentence in Section 5 before we describe the
    C-code:

    \begin{quote}
      While there is no formal connection between our formalisation
      and the C-code shown below, the results of the formalisation
      clearly shine through in the design of the code.
    \end{quote}  
  \end{quote}

\item{\it The model cannot express the execution of instructions. As a
    result, it is difficult to express the case that the critical
    region does infinite loops without generating events for system
    calls.}

  \begin{quote}
    Yes, we discuss this limitation in the first paragraph of section
    4 and already wrote that in this aspect we do not
    improve the limitations of the original paper by Sha et al.
  \end{quote}

\item{\it The authors should have provided URL of their mechanized
    proofs for the review process.}

  \begin{quote}
    As is costumn, we have given a link to the sources. 
    It is mentioned in the last
    sentence of the conclusion.
    
    The code of our formalisation can be downloaded from the Mercurial
    repository at \url{http://talisker.inf.kcl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/repos.cgi/pip}.
  \end{quote}  

\item{\it It is more like engineering work. It's unclear what general
    principles or theories are proposed.}

  \begin{center}
    The general point we are making is that a `proof-by-hand' is
    generally worthless in this area for ensuring the correctness of
    an algorithm. We underline this point by listing the references
    [13, 14, 15, 20, 24, 25], which all repeat the error from the
    original paper.

    More specifically we extend the claims of Sha at al and give
    a machine-checked formalisation  of our claims (the first such
    formalisation for PIP). We also wrote about our experiences: 

    \begin{quote}
      Following good experience in earlier work [27], our model of PIP
      is based on Paulson’s inductive approach for protocol
      verification [18].
    \end{quote}
  \end{center}  
  
\end{document}