A randomized dynamic program analysis technique for detecting real deadlocks

  • Authors:

  • Pallavi Joshi;Chang-Seo Park;Koushik Sen;Mayur Naik

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;Intel Research, Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We present a novel dynamic analysis technique that finds real deadlocks in multi-threaded programs. Our technique runs in two stages. In the first stage, we use an imprecise dynamic analysis technique to find potential deadlocks in a multi-threaded program by observing an execution of the program. In the second stage, we control a random thread scheduler to create the potential deadlocks with high probability. Unlike other dynamic analysis techniques, our approach has the advantage that it does not give any false warnings. We have implemented the technique in a prototype tool for Java, and have experimented on a number of large multi-threaded Java programs. We report a number of previously known and unknown real deadlocks that were found in these benchmarks.