A Scalable, Sound, Eventually-Complete Algorithm for Deadlock Immunity

We introduce the concept of deadlock immunity—a program’s ability to avoid all deadlocks that match patterns of deadlocks experienced in the past. We present here an algorithm for enabling large software systems to automatically acquire such immunity without any programmer assistance. We prove that the algorithm is sound and complete under reasonable assumptions. We implemented the described technique in Java and present here measurements that show it introduces only modest performance overhead in real applications (e.g., < 6% in JBoss). Since deadlock immunity is as powerful as complete freedom from deadlocks in most practical cases, the proposed technique takes a new step toward resolving the long-standing challenge of ridding complex concurrent programs of their deadlocks.