Can lock ordering be enforced / detected to prevent deadlocks?

Vote count:

1

I have inherited a big project with long history, and my task is to fix a bunch of deadlocks that have been reported over the years.

I understand the nature of a few deadlocks, and can reproduce them consistently using some carefully-placed Sleeps and other forced-timings.

But, fixing the deadlocks is not so simple. The code was not written with any strategy with regards to locking resources. I can hand-craft solutions for every deadlock, but much of it boils down to a problem of lock ordering.

For example, Worker 1:

Acquires resource A
{
  ...
  Acquires resource B
  {
    ...
  }
}

While worker 2 does this:

Acquires resource B
{
  ...
  Acquires resource A
  {
    ...
  }
}

So my question is: What is the best way to detect and/or enforce lock ordering problems in the code? Static analysis? Is there a compile-time way to detect this (ideal)? Or must I resort to detecting this kind of problem at runtime?

Any help is appreciated.

asked 1 min ago

tenfour

16.1k