Distributed detection of generalized deadlocks

Abstract

Fast and efficient detection of deadlocks remains an important problem in distributed operating systems. We present a distributed algorithm to detect generalized deadlocks in distributed systems. The algorithm performs reduction of a distributed wait-for-graph (WFG) to determine a deadlock. If sufficient information to decide the reducibility of a node is not available at that node, the algorithm attempts reduction later in a lazy manner. We prove the correctness of the algorithm. The algorithm has a message complexity of 2e messages and a worst case time complexity of 2d hops, where e is the number of edges and d is the diameter of the WFG. The algorithm is shown to perform better in both time and message complexity than the best known distributed algorithms to detect distributed generalized deadlocks. We conjecture that the algorithm is optimal in the number of messages and time delay, among distributed algorithms to detect generalized deadlocks.