Determinism at Standard-Library Level in TM-Based Applications

Abstract

Deterministic execution of a multi-threaded application guarantees that threads access shared memory in the same order and the application gives the same output whenever it runs with the same input parameters. Determinism provides repeatability, which helps programmers in testing and debugging. Additionally, transactional memory (TM) simplifies development of multi-threaded applications so that programmers can use transactions (instead of locks) to synchronize accesses to shared memory. However, transactions that call standard library functions have to be serialized, i.e. to be executed as the only running transactions in the system. The serialization enforces an order of threads execution usually different from the one enforced by a system for deterministic multithreading, which causes deadlocks in the application execution. In this paper, we present DeTrans-lib, the first standard C library that provides deterministic execution of TM-based applications at application and standard-library level. DeTrans-lib avoids deadlocks by performing transaction serialization in deterministic order. We evaluate DeTrans-lib with the benchmarks that invoke a standard C library and perform I/O operations.