Static Deadlock Detection for Interrupt-driven Embedded Software

Interrupt-driven embedded software is widely used in safety-critical systems, where any occurrence of errors can lead to serious consequences. Deadlock is a common concurrency error, and deadlock detection methods are mainly designed for multi-threaded programs. However, due to the differences in concurrency control and preemption mechanisms between interrupt-driven programs and multi-threaded programs, the existing deadlock detection methods for multi-threaded programs cannot be directly applied to interrupt-driven programs. A static deadlock detection method is proposed for interrupt-driven programs to enhance the reliability and safety of interrupt-driven embedded software. Building upon the traditional context-sensitive lockset analysis, this method takes into account the concurrent semantics of interrupts and extends the lock graph model. Our method effectively reduces false positives by analyzing the concurrent relationships of cycles in a lock graph. Based on these methods, we develop a deadlock detection tool, and experiments are conducted with it. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively detect deadlocks related to interrupts.