Deadlock Detector

Basic python script for helping to check for deadlocks in C/C++ programs that use POSIX mutexes as the primary synchronization mechanism.

Requirements

Internally, this script calls the C/C++ program using GDB. As such, this script requires GDB to be installed, and that the program being debugged is compiled with the -g compiler flag. Additionally, this program will not work for multi-processed programs.

Usage

This script can be run from the command line or by importing in python

CLI

This script can be called from the command line:

python3 deadlock_detector [--print] <executable file> <executable arguments...>

Import

Use a context manager to open up a DeadlockDetector:

from deadlock_detector import DeadlockDetector

with DeadlockDetector({ executable file name }) as dd:
  dd.run({ executable arguments }) # Run the program using the deadlock detector
  dd.verify_lock_stacks() # Ensure all pthread_mutex_lock call stacks don't have deadlock