Spin is a widely used open-source software verification tool.
The tool can be used for the
formal verification of multi-threaded software applications.
The tool was developed at
Bell Labs in the Unix group of the Computing
Sciences Research Center, starting in 1980, and
has been available freely since 1991. Spin
continues to evolve to keep pace with new developments in the field.
In April 2002 the tool was awarded the ACM
System Software Award.
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Open Source: Starting with Version 6.4.5 from January 2016,
the Spin sources are available under the standard BSD 3-Clause open source license.
Spin is now also part of the latest stable release of Debian Linux, and
has made it into the 16.10+ distributions of Ubuntu.
The current Spin version is 6.5.1 (July 2020).
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Be one of the first reviewers!
Courses: A short online course
in software verification and logic model checking is available (password required).
There are a total 15 short lectures covering the automata-theoretic verification
method, the basic use of Spin, model extraction from
C source code, abstraction methods, and swarm verification techniques.
You can see an overview via this link.
An excellent introduction to the basics of model checking.
In-Depth: A full one semester college-level course is also available,
complete with transcripts of every lecture, quizzes, assignments, and
exercises to test your understanding and practice
new skills. Details can be found in this syllabus.
Tau Tool: A simple front-end tool for Spin, called Tau
(short for Tiny Automata) can be downloaded from:
https://spinroot.com/spin/tau_v1.tar.gz,
and is distributed under
LGPL,
originally by Caltech, as a teaching tool for formal verification and finite automata.
// a small example spin model
// Peterson's solution to the mutual exclusion problem (1981)
bool turn, flag[2]; // the shared variables, booleans
byte ncrit; // nr of procs in critical section
active [2] proctype user() // two processes
{assert(_pid == 0 || _pid == 1);
again:
flag[_pid] = 1;
turn = _pid;
(flag[1 - _pid] == 0 || turn == 1 - _pid);
ncrit++;
assert(ncrit == 1); // critical section
ncrit--;
flag[_pid] = 0;
goto again
}
// analysis:
// $ spin -run peterson.pml
![[banner]](https://spinroot.com/spin/m42_crop.jpg)
![[logo]](https://spinroot.com/spin/spinlogo2.gif)
