The pairwise reachability problem for a multi-threaded program asks, given
control locations in two threads, whether they can be simultaneously reached in
an execution of the program. The problem is important for static analysis and
is used to detect statements that are concurrently enabled. This problem is in
general undecidable even when data is abstracted and when the threads (with
recursion) synchronize only using a finite set of locks. Popular programming
paradigms that limit the lock usage patterns have been identified under which
the pairwise reachability problem becomes decidable. In this paper, we consider
a new natural programming paradigm, called contextual locking, which ties the
lock usage to calling patterns in each thread: we assume that locks are
released in the same context that they were acquired and that every lock
acquired by a thread in a procedure call is released before the procedure
returns. Our main result is that the pairwise reachability problem is
polynomial-time decidable for this new programming paradigm as well. The
problem becomes undecidable if the locks are reentrant; reentrant locking is a
\emph{recursive locking} mechanism which allows a thread in a multi-threaded
program to acquire the reentrant lock multiple times.Comment: A preliminary version appears in TACAS 201
