Automatic repair for multi-threaded programs with Deadlock/Livelock using maximum satisfiability
Yiyan Lin, Sandeep S. Kulkarni · 2014
Deadlock-freedom is a major challenge in developing multi-threaded programs, as a deadlock cannot be resolved until one restarts the program (mostly by using manual intervention). To avoid the risk of blocking, a program may use the trylock operations rather than lock operations. In this case, if a thread fails to acquire a lock using trylock, since trylock is non-blocking, the thread can release acquired locks to avoid a deadlock after trylock returns. Although this approach avoids deadlocks, it may also introduce bugs such as livelock and deadlivelock. Moreover, when such bugs are identified in a program, revising the program manually is error-prone.