An Efficient and Flexible Deterministic Framework for Multithreaded Programs

Abstract

Determinism is very useful to multithreaded programs in debugging, testing, etc. Many deterministic approaches have been proposed, such as deterministic multithreading (DMT) and deterministic replay. However, these systems either are inefficient or target a single purpose, which is not flexible. In this paper, we propose an efficient and flexible deterministic framework for multithreaded programs. Our framework implements determinism in two steps: relaxed determinism and strong determinism. Relaxed determinism solves data races efficiently by using a proper weak memory consistency model. After that, we implement strong determinism by solving lock contentions deterministically. Since we can apply different approaches for these two steps independently, our framework provides a spectrum of deterministic choices, including nondeterministic system (fast), weak deterministic system (fast and conditionally deterministic), DMT system, and deterministic replay system. Our evaluation shows that the DMT configuration of this framework could even outperform a state-of-the-art DMT system.