Detecting Potential Deadlocks with Static Analysis and Run-Time Monitoring

Concurrent programs are notorious for containing errors that are difficult to reproduce and diagnose. A common kind of concurrency error is deadlock, which occurs when a set of threads is blocked each trying to acquire a lock held by another thread in that set. Static and dynamic (run-time) analysis techniques exist to detect deadlocks. Havelund’s GoodLock algorithm detects potential deadlocks at runtime. However, it detects only potential deadlocks involving exactly two threads. This paper presents a generalized version of the GoodLock algorithm that detects potential deadlocks involving any number of threads. Run-time checking may miss errors in unexecuted code. On the positive side, run-time checking generally produces fewer false alarms than static analysis. This paper explores the use of static analysis to automatically reduce the overhead of run-time checking. We extend our type system, Extended Parameterized Atomic Java (EPAJ), which ensures absence of races and atomicity viol...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: HVC
• Authors: Rahul Agarwal, Liqiang Wang, Scott D. Stoller
• Keywords: HVC 2005, Potential Deadlocks, Run-time Checking, Type Systems