Scrider: Using Single Critical Sections to Avoid Deadlocks

Abstract

We propose a method, called Scrider, to avoid dead-locks before they manifest themselves. When running it together with a multithreaded program, Scrider interferes in thread scheduling to ensure that at any time there is only one thread in the critical state. By this way, Scrider can avoid any dead-lock involving two or more threads. For a self-deadlock that involves only one thread, Scrider captures it as soon as it happens and spits out enough information to support source-level debugging. Scrider is designed to avoid deadlocks caused by mutual exclusive locks or read/write locks in Pthread interface. Scrider is implemented as a pre-loadable library and doesn't require either modifying the source code or recompiling/relinking the target program, so that Scrider can be used directly to avoid deadlocks in current applications. Experiment results with nine benchmarks show that Scrider wokrs well in avoiding deadlocks caused by mutual exclusive locks and read/write locks.