Platform-wide Deadlock Immunity for Mobile Phones

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 platform-wide failure immunity