Jinx is a concurrency

Concurrency (computer science)

In computer science, concurrency is a property of systems in which several computations are executing simultaneously, and potentially interacting with each other...

 debugger

Debugger

A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program that is used to test and debug other programs . The code to be examined might alternatively be running on an instruction set simulator , a technique that allows great power in its ability to halt when specific conditions are encountered but which...

 that deterministically controls the interleaving of workloads across processor cores, focusing on shared memory interactions. Using this deterministic approach, Jinx is able to increase the frequency of occurrence of elusive shared memory bugs, sometimes called Heisenbugs. Jinx works by dynamically building a set of potential interleavings (i.e. alternate eventualities, or execution scenarios, that will occur under some future condition) that are most likely to result in concurrency faults, and quickly tests those execution paths to surface concurrency problems such as deadlock

Deadlock

A deadlock is a situation where in two or more competing actions are each waiting for the other to finish, and thus neither ever does. It is often seen in a paradox like the "chicken or the egg"...

s, race condition

Race condition

A race condition or race hazard is a flaw in an electronic system or process whereby the output or result of the process is unexpectedly and critically dependent on the sequence or timing of other events...

s and atomicity violations that are found in multiprocessing

Multiprocessing

Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor and/or the ability to allocate tasks between them...

 applications.

Unlike model checkers, Jinx does not require the specification of a model. Unlike dynamic

Dynamic program analysis

Dynamic program analysis is the analysis of computer software that is performed by executing programs built from that software system on a real or virtual processor. For dynamic program analysis to be effective, the target program must be executed with sufficient test inputs to produce interesting...

 and static

Static code analysis

Static program analysis is the analysis of computer software that is performed without actually executing programs built from that software In most cases the analysis is performed on some version of the source code and in the other cases some form of the object code...

 code analysis methods, Jinx is notable in that it produces no false positives (spurious bug reports). This is because Jinx actually tests the scenarios that are likely to be bugs, as opposed to just inferring those scenarios by analyzing source code or observing the execution of a program.

Jinx is implemented as a hypervisor

Hypervisor

In computing, a hypervisor, also called virtual machine manager , is one of many hardware virtualization techniques that allow multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer. It is so named because it is conceptually one level higher than a supervisory program...

, giving it the ability to observe the effects of all elements of the software environment on thread interleaving. Jinx operates independently of any programming language or threading libraries or tools.

Jinx has been developed by Corensic in Seattle, Washington based on research performed at the University of Washington and initially presented at the ASPLOS conference of 2009.