Determinism at Standard Library Level in Transactional Memory Based Applications

Deterministic execution of a multi-threaded application guarantees that threads access shared memory in the same order and the application gives the same output when it runs with the same input parameters. Determinism provides repeatability, which helps a programmer in testing and debugging. Additionally, Transactional Memory (TM) simplifies development of applications that use transactions (instead of locks) to synchronize accesses to shared memory. However, transactions that call standard library functions have to be serialized, and the serialization causes a deadlock when applications run with the deterministic systems proposed so far. In this paper, we present DeTrans-lib, the first standard C library that provides deterministic execution of TM-based applications at user and standard-library level. DeTrans-lib avoids deadlocks by performing transaction serialization in deterministic order. We evaluate DeTrans-lib using benchmarks that perform I/O operations.