A type and effect system for deadlock avoidance in low-level languages

Dynamic deadlock avoidance in systems code using statically inferred effects

“…Unmatched unlock and lock effects are placed at the end and the beginning of the summarized effect respectively. We have shown formally the soundness of our summary [9], which is a conservative approximation of the actual effect of recursive functions. Intuitively, the summary function guarantees that all lock operations included in a recursive function f will be included in the future lockset of a lock operation preceding the call of f .…”

“…To overcome this issue, our analysis assigns function names a summary of the effect of their bodies. Although in this paper we do not formally define what function summary does (see [9] for its definition), a possible (but conservative) choice here would be to "flatten" or merge all branches of the effect corresponding to the body of a recursive function, by placing all matched operations in a single "atomic" effect. Unmatched unlock and lock effects are placed at the end and the beginning of the summarized effect respectively.…”

“…Some of these programs use language features that could not be handled by the preliminary implementation of our system [9]. The performance results are shown in Table 1 Table 1.…”

“…We have recently developed a method to dynamically avoid deadlocks guided by information about the order of explicit lock and unlock operations collected statically by program analysis [9]. Our static analysis is based on a type and effect system that is general enough to be applicable regardless of how locking is used.…”

“…Safe lock usage is not addressed in other tools (e.g., [10]) which can only prevent data races given the assumption that there are no dangling unlock operations. Building upon the technique formally developed in our previous work [9], in this paper we outline an extended implementation that can support locks residing in dynamically allocated data structures in a context-sensitive and field-sensitive manner, stack-allocated data structures containing lock handles, and several optimizations that minimize the run time overhead of deadlock avoidance.…”