ENSURING DETERMINISTIC THREAD CONTEXT SWITCHING IN VIRTUAL MACHINE APPLICATIONS

Techniques for ensuring deterministic thread context switching in a virtual machine application program include, in one embodiment, providing a single application-level mutex that threads of the executing application program are forced to acquire to execute application code of the virtual machine application program. During a first recorded execution of the virtual machine application program, a record is created and stored in a computer that indicates the order in which threads acquire the application-level mutex. In a subsequent replay execution of the virtual machine application program from the recording, threads of the virtual machine application program are managed to ensure that the application-level mutex is acquired by threads in the same order indicated in the record such that any race conditions that occurred during the recorded execution as a result of executing application code are reproduced during the subsequent replay execution thereby aiding application development personnel in identifying and isolating program errors and bugs related to race conditions.