Peahen: fast and precise static deadlock detection via context reduction

Abstract

Deadlocks still severely inflict reliability and security issues upon software systems of the modern age. Worse still, as we note, in prior static deadlock detectors, good precision does not go hand-in-hand with high scalability - - their approaches are either context-insensitive, thereby engendering many false positives, or suffer from the calling context explosion to reach context-sensitive, thus compromising good efficiency. In this paper, we advocate Peahen, geared towards precise yet also scalable static deadlock detection. At its crux, Peahen decomposes the computational effort for embracing high precision into two cooperative analysis stages: (i) context-insensitive lock-graph construction, which selectively encodes the essential lock-acquisition information on each edge, and (ii) three precise yet lazy refinements, which incorporate such edge information into progressively refining the deadlock cycles in the lock graph only for a few interesting calling contexts. Our extensive experiments yield promising results: Peahen dramatically out-performs the state-of-the-art tools on accuracy without losing scalability; it can efficiently check million-line systems at a low false positive rate; and it has uncovered many confirmed deadlocks in dozens of mature open-source systems.