Detecting Deadlocks in Concurrent Systems

We use a geometric description for deadlocks occurring in schedulingproblems for concurrent systems to construct a partial order and hence a directed graph, in which the local maxima correspond to deadlocks. Algorithms finding deadlocks are described and assessed.Keywords: deadlock, partial order, search algorithm, concurrency, distributedsystems

Detecting Deadlocks in Concurrent Systems

We use a geometric description for deadlocks occurring in schedulingproblems for concurrent systems to construct a partial order and hence a directed graph, in which the local maxima correspond to deadlocks. Algorithms finding deadlocks are described and assessed.Keywords: deadlock, partial order, search algorithm, concurrency, distributedsystems

Using Partial Orders for the Efficient Verification of Deadlock Freedom and Safety Properties

This article presents an algorithm for detecting deadlocks in concurrent finite-state systems without incurring most of the state explosion due to the modeling of concurrency by interleaving. For systems that have a high level of concurrency, our algorithm can be much more efficient than the classical exploration of the whole state space. Finally, we show that our algorithm can also be used for verifying arbitrary safety properties

A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs

The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated citation

Sound Static Deadlock Analysis for C/Pthreads (Extended Version)

We present a static deadlock analysis approach for C/pthreads. The design of our method has been guided by the requirement to analyse real-world code. Our approach is sound (i.e., misses no deadlocks) for programs that have defined behaviour according to the C standard, and precise enough to prove deadlock-freedom for a large number of programs. The method consists of a pipeline of several analyses that build on a new context- and thread-sensitive abstract interpretation framework. We further present a lightweight dependency analysis to identify statements relevant to deadlock analysis and thus speed up the overall analysis. In our experimental evaluation, we succeeded to prove deadlock-freedom for 262 programs from the Debian GNU/Linux distribution with in total 2.6 MLOC in less than 11 hours

Formal verification of distributed deadlock detection algorithms

The problem of distributed deadlock detection has undergone extensive study. Formal verification of deadlock detection algorithms in distributed systems is an area of research that has largely been ignored. Instead, most proposed distributed deadlock detection algorithms have used informal or intuitive arguments, simulation or just neglect the entire aspect of verification of correctness; As a consequence, many of these algorithms have been shown incorrect. This research will abstract the notion of deadlock in terms of a temporal logic of actions and discuss the invariant and eventuality properties. The contributions of this research are the development of a distributed deadlock detection algorithm and the formal verification of this algorithm

Deadlock detection of Java Bytecode

This paper presents a technique for deadlock detection of Java programs. The technique uses typing rules for extracting infinite-state abstract models of the dependencies among the components of the Java intermediate language -- the Java bytecode. Models are subsequently analysed by means of an extension of a solver that we have defined for detecting deadlocks in process calculi. Our technique is complemented by a prototype verifier that also covers most of the Java features.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur, Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854

Unlocking Blocked Communicating Processes

We study the problem of disentangling locked processes via code refactoring. We identify and characterise a class of processes that is not lock-free; then we formalise an algorithm that statically detects potential locks and propose refactoring procedures that disentangle detected locks. Our development is cast within a simple setting of a finite linear CCS variant \^a although it suffices to illustrate the main concepts, we also discuss how our work extends to other language extensions.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338