Slider: An online and active deadlock avoider by serial execution of critical sections

Existing dynamic deadlock avoidance techniques have four main drawbacks: limited capability, offline avoidance algorithm, passive avoidance strategy and poor usability. To solve these problems, we propose a user-friendly, online and active avoidance technique, called Slider, to avoid multiple types of deadlocks. The key idea of Slider is that deadlocks will not happen if critical sections are executed serially. Slider interferes in thread scheduling to ensure that at any time only one thread is in the critical state. We design Slider to avoid all deadlocks except self-deadlocks caused by mutexes or rwlocks in pthread interface. We implement Slider as a pre-loadable library so that it can be applied directly to existing applications. We do four experiments to evaluate avoidance capability, performance overhead and scalability of Slider, comparing with three state-of-the-art avoidance techniques. Experimental results show Slider can correctly avoid multiple types of deadlocks in an online, active, efficient and scalable way.