Intention Preservation in Deterministic Multithreading

In this paper, we present an analogy between the race condition resolution in a multithreaded application, and conflict resolution for concurrent updates in collaborative editing applications. We introduce the intention preservation problem in deterministic multithreading for programs with race conditions. We point out that current state-of-the-art deterministic multithreading approaches do not have any mechanism to preserve the intention of a program when it is instrumented for deterministic execution. Furthermore, we propose a solution for intention preservation in deterministic multithreading provided that the unprotected shared variables are primitive types.