Static Lock Capabilities for Deadlock Freedom

The authors present a technique - lock capabilities - for statically verifying that multi-threaded programs with locks will not deadlock. Most previous work on deadlock prevention requires a strict total order on all locks held simultaneously by a thread, but such an invariant often does not hold with fine-grained locking, especially when data-structure mutations change the order locks are acquired. Lock capabilities support idioms that use fine-grained locking, such as mutable binary trees, circular lists, and arrays where each element has a different lock.