Dthreads: Efficient Deterministic Multithreading

Tongping Liu, Charlie Curtsinger, Emery D. Berger
tonyliu@cs.umass.edu
charlie@cs.umass.edu
emery@cs.umass.edu

http://plasma.cs.umass.edu

Copyright (C) 2011-2012 University of Massachusetts Amherst

Building Dthreads

You can build the dthreads library (libdthread.so) by running make. That library is for 64-bit systems (the default); the 32-bit version is called libdthread32.so.

NOTE: if your system does not support the SSE3 instruction set, then remove SSE_SUPPORT from the Makefile.

Using Dthreads

Dthreads currently only supports Linux/x86 platforms.

1. Compile your program to object files (here, we use just one, target.o).

2. Link to the dthreads library. There are two options (neither of which is particular to dthreads).

(a) Dynamic linking: this approach requires no environment variables, but the dthreads library needs to be in a fixed, known location. Place the dthreads library in a directory (DTHREAD_DIR).

  Then compile your program as follows:

% g++ target.o -rdynamic DTHREAD_DIR/libdthread.so -ldl -o target  

(b) Ordinary dynamic linking: this approach is more flexible (you can change the location of the dthreads library), but you must also set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

% g++ target.o -LDTHREAD_DIR -ldthread -dl -o target  
% export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=DTHREAD_DIR:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH  

Citing Dthreads

If you use dthreads, we would appreciate hearing about it. To cite dthreads, please refer to the following paper, included as doc/dthreads-sosp11.pdf.

@inproceedings{dthreads,
author = {Liu, Tongping and Curtsinger, Charlie and Berger, Emery D. },
title = {Dthreads: Efficient Deterministic Multithreading},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles},
series = {SOSP '11},
year = {2011},
location = {Cascais, Portugal},
numpages = {10},
acmid = {1640096},
publisher = {ACM},
}

Acknowledgment and Disclaimer

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0910883.

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).