Jinx: a novel Linux deterministic multiprocessing debugger

Their debugger searches for bugs exhaustively over all non-equivalent thread timings, but I can find no mention (in the paper or otherwise) of whether this will blow up with a large number of threads or amount of control flow; even the illustration on their site screams "exponential!" to me.<p>Interesting paper from what I could glean, though.<p>EDIT: "Jinx dynamically builds a set of potential interleavings (i.e., alternate eventualities, or execution scenarios, that will occur under some future set of conditions) that are most likely to result in concurrency faults, and quickly tests those execution paths to surface concurrency problems including deadlocks, race conditions, and atomicity violations." So it's more selective than I first thought.

i'm very naive about what makes concurrency so difficult. am i right in thinking the core challenge is sharing memory resources between threads, and using shared memory to communicate between them?<p>can we imagine an abstraction layer now which would solve all our (concurrency) problems, but which would simply be too slow on current hardware to actually use?

Are there any non-commercial tools that do similar things? I'm looking for a way to test a faster and smaller read-write lock implementation I'm playing with, but as it's a hobby project I can't afford to buy professional tools for it.<p>I'd be looking for something that would run on Linux. Open source would of course be nice, but free is probably more important to me in this case. Finished product will be open-source designed to replace pthread's rwlocks.

If you haven't seen this. It's a must have.

And Windows.