MagicFuzzer: Scalable deadlock detection for large-scale applications

We present MagicFuzzer, a novel dynamic deadlock detection technique. Unlike existing techniques to locate potential deadlock cycles from an execution, it iteratively prunes lock dependencies that each has no incoming or outgoing edge. Combining with a novel thread-specific strategy, it dramatically shrinks the size of lock dependency set for cycle detection, improving the efficiency and scalability of such a detection significantly. In the real deadlock confirmation phase, it uses a new strategy to actively schedule threads of an execution against the whole set of potential deadlock cycles. We have implemented a prototype and evaluated it on large-scale C/C++ programs. The experimental results confirm that our technique is significantly more effective and efficient than existing techniques.