Platform-wide deadlock immunity for mobile phones

Abstract

Abstract-We present an implementation of our deadlock immunity system, Dimmunix, for mobile phone software. Within Android 2.2 OS, we modified Dalvik VM, the JVM running all the Android applications, to provide platform-wide deadlock immunity. We successfully ran the Dimmunix-enabled Android 2.2 OS on a Nexus One phone. On the phone, we reproduced a real deadlock involving Android's NotificationManagerService and StatusBarService classes, which froze the entire phone's interface. Android Dimmunix successfully detected the deadlock, and subsequently prevented its reoccurrence, with no user intervention. Our tests show that Android Dimmunix incurs 4-5% performance overhead and 4% memory overhead. Therefore, Android Dimmunix is a practical and efficient solution to cope with deadlocks on mobile phones. To the best of our knowledge, Android Dimmunix is the first failure immunity system for mobile phones, and the first one to provide platformwide failure immunity.

Charting the API minefield using software telemetry data

“…Dimmunix (Jula et al 2008(Jula et al , 2011 is such a tool for Android applications. Also, RacerX (Engler and Ashcraft 2003), Jlint (Artho and Biere 2001), and EPAJ (Agarwal et al 2006) Static code analyzers test applications from many different angles.…”

Race detection for Android applications

“…The highest number of threads were created by the Flipkart application (36 of them without task queues and 3 with queues). These numbers do not include the count of binder threads and other system threads created by the Android runtime for the applications (usually about [10][11][12][13][14][15]. The applications also made many asynchronous calls (see the column "Async.…”

“…Therefore, the asynchronous tasks executing the read and write operations 16 and 21 also are not ordered and give rise to another potential data race but this time between two operations on the same thread. As operation 21 (line 15 in Figure 1) sets isActivityDestroyed to true, if the operations in any of the two racey pairs (12,21) and (16,21) are reordered then the corresponding assertions at lines 41 and 53 in Figure 1 would fail. …”

“…Dimmunix [12] is a tool to detect and recover from deadlocks. There are tools that check Android applications against specific thread usage policies; e.g., Android's StrictMode tool dynamically checks that the UI thread does not perform I/O or other time-consuming operations, Zhang et al [29] statically check that only the UI thread accesses UI objects.…”