Deadlock immunity is a property by which programs, once afflicted by a deadlock pattern, develop the ability to avoid future occurrences of that deadlock pattern. Over time, programs with such an "immune system" progressively increase their resistance to deadlocks.

Dimmunix is a tool for giving software systems such an immune system against deadlock, without any assistance from programmers or users. Dimmunix is well suited for general purpose software (desktop and enterprise applications, server software, etc.) and a recent extension allows application communities to collaborate in achieving enhanced immunity.

Dimmunix is available for both Java and C/C++. We have used it on real systems (JBoss, MySQL, ActiveMQ, Apache httpd, MySQL JDBC, Java JDK, Limewire) and proven it effective in avoiding real, reported deadlock bugs, while introducing only modest performance overhead (up to 4.5% on a lock-intensive microbenchmark with 1,024 threads). For more details, please see:

• Deadlock Immunity: Enabling Systems To Defend Against Deadlocks, by Horatiu Jula, Daniel Tralamazza, Cristian Zamfir, George Candea. Proc. 8th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, San Diego, CA, December 2008.
• Dimmunix website