The purpose of the 'deadlock' mutex in Informix Server instance

The 'deadlock' mutex is used to ensure there will never be more than one session checking for a deadlock situation at any given time. The deadlock checking code is executed by sessions which have the LOCK MODE set to WAIT [seconds] whenever some lock is requested.

The deadlock checking code starts with marking all the sessions in the instance with an internal flag saying 'not in deadlock'. Then it walks through the list of all the locks held by the current session (including the newly requested one) and for each lock it identifies whether there are some sessions waiting for it. If such a session (called waiter) is found, its internal flag is changed to 'deadlock candidate' and the waiter is added into the so called 'deadlock list'. Each of the waiters in this list is then checked in the same way - the code checks whether any of the waiters holds any lock the current session is waiting for. If such a lock is found a deadlock is detected.

Each execution of the deadlock checking code depends on a consistent state of the internal 'deadlock' flag in each session. In other words there can't be more sessions checking for the deadlock at the same time, as they would overwrite that internal flag mutually. To ensure this, each session has to acquire the 'deadlock' mutex before the deadlock checking code can be executed and release it once the deadlock detection is finished.