U.S. patents available from 1976 to present.
U.S. patent applications available from 2005 to present.

Icon_funbox Quotables

"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."

Sir William Preece, chief engineer, British Post Office ; 1878

Newsletter  PatentStorm News

Make the Most of PatentStorm

See this month's Top Inventors and Most Cited Patents.

Stay on top of the latest patents by subscribing to an RSS feed.

Got questions? Ask a Patent Expert!

Registered users: Manage your profile, comments and alerts.

 

US Patent 5822588 - System and method for checking the use of synchronization locks in a multi-threaded target program

US Patent Issued on October 13, 1998
Estimated Patent Expiration Date: Icon_subject June 9, 2015Estimated Expiration Date is calculated based on simple USPTO term provisions. It does not account for terminal disclaimers, term adjustments, failure to pay maintenance fees, or other factors which might affect the term of a patent.
loading...


View Patent Images (PDF)
(Registered users only)

Abstract

The present invention is a system and method for "checking the use of synchronization locks in a multi-threaded computer program" (hereinafter "WARLOCK II"). In Warlock II a set of source code representing a process which includes multiple threads may be annotated by the developer using a "NOTE" macro to describe the desired operation of the locks. This annotated source code is passed to a modified ANSI C compiler which outputs a special file designated a ".ll" file, as for example, file "foo.ll". This special ".ll" file is then processed as input along with other designated ".ll" files which might be related, by a "wlanalyze" program which will check the source code of the target programs in the ".ll" files to determine whether their use of synchronization locks is consistent with the intended use as specified in the annotations.

Other References

  • "Solaris Multithreaded Programming Guide", SunSoft, pp. iii-158
  • "Sema: a Lint-like Tool for Analyzing Semaphore Usage in a Multithreaded UNIX Kernal", Joseph A. Korty, MODCOMP, an AEG Company, USENIX-Winter '89, pp. 113-123
  • "WARLOCK-A static Data Race Analysis Tool", Nicholas Sterling, SunSoft, Inc., 1993 Winter USENIX-Jan. 25-29, 1993-San Diego, CA, pp. 97-106
  • "lock- Lint User's Guide", SunSoft, pp. iii-6

Inventors

Assignee

Application

No. 489197 filed on 06/09/1995

US Classes:

717/131, Including analysis of program execution717/146Including intermediate code

Examiners

Primary: Trammell, James P.
Assistant: Chavis, John Q.

Attorney, Agent or Firm

US Patent References

4667290, Compilers using a universal intermediate language
Issued on: 05/19/1987
Inventor: Goss ,   et al.
5450592, Shared resource control using a deferred operations list
Issued on: 09/12/1995
Inventor: McLeod
5481706, System and method for creating thread-safe shared libraries
Issued on: 01/02/1996
Inventor: Peek
5524247, System for scheduling programming units to a resource based on status variables indicating a lock or lock-wait state thereof
Issued on: 06/04/1996
Inventor: Mizuno
5535393, System for parallel processing that compiles a filed sequence of instructions within an iteration space
Issued on: 07/09/1996
Inventor: Reeve, et al.
5590326, Shared data management scheme using shared data locks for multi-threading
Issued on: 12/31/1996
Inventor: Manabe
5632032Cross address space thread control in a multithreaded environment
Issued on: 05/20/1997
Inventor: Ault, et al.

International Class

G06F 012/06

Comments

No comments for this page
 
 
Forgot password?
Register here