Towards Detecting Thread Deadlock in Java Programs with JVM Introspection

Deadlock is a common error for multithread Java programs. Existing Java thread deadlock detection solutions either require source code, or are built on non-official JVMs. In a consequence, a great number of Java programs cannot be evaluated with these solutions. This paper proposes a new Java thread deadlock detection approach, namely JDeadlockDetector. JDeadlockDetector is built on the official Java Virtual Machine (JVM), viz., OpenJDK's HotSpot. Compared to existing methods, JDeadlockDetector archieves three unique advantages, i.e., application transparency, detection accuracy and minimized performance overhead. Our functionality evaluation shows JDeadlockDetector achieves no false negative and minimized false positive while the performance evaluation shows the workloads generated by SPECjbb2005 achieve 96.7% of official JVM speed on average.