Dimmunix: Deadlock Immunity

From Dimmunix: Deadlock Immunity (Dependable Systems Lab)

Dimmunix is a tool for giving software systems … an immune system against deadlock, without any assistance from programmers or users. Dimmunix is well suited for general purpose software (desktop and enterprise applications, server software, etc.) and a recent extension allows application communities to collaborate in achieving enhanced immunity.

I haven't had time to read the paper.

Deadlock immunity is a property by which programs, once afflicted by a given deadlock, develop resistance against future occurrences of that and similar deadlocks. We describe a technique that enables programs to automatically gain such immunity without assistance from programmers or users. We implemented the technique for both Java and POSIX threads and evaluated it with several real systems, including MySQL, JBoss, SQLite, Apache ActiveMQ, Limewire, and Java JDK. The results demonstrate effectiveness against real deadlock bugs, while incurring modest performance overhead and scaling to 1024 threads. We therefore conclude that deadlock immunity offers programmers and users an attractive tool for coping with elusive deadlocks.