Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Dead Lock

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

In the computing world deadlock refers to a specific condition when two or more processes are each waiting for another to release a resource, or more than two processes are waiting for resources in a circular chain (see Necessary conditions). Deadlock is a common problem in multiprocessing where many processes share a specific type of mutually exclusive resource known as a software, or soft, lock. Computers intended for the time-sharing and/or real-time markets are often equipped with a hardware lock (or hard lock) which guarantees exclusive access to processes, forcing serialization. Deadlocks are particularly troubling because there is no general solution to avoid (soft) deadlocks.

One known algorithm that is used for deadlock avoidance is the Banker's algorithm, which requires resource usage limit to be known in advance. However, for many systems it is impossible to know in advance what every process will request. This means that deadlock avoidance is often impossible.


The Banker's algorithm is a resource allocation & deadlock avoidance algorithm developed by Edsger Dijkstra that tests for safety by simulating the allocation of pre-determined maximum possible amounts of all resources, and then makes a "safe-state" check to test for possible deadlock conditions for all other pending activities, before deciding whether allocation should be allowed to continue.

The algorithm was developed in the design process for the THE operating system and originally described (in Dutch) in EWD108[1]. The name is by analogy with the way that bankers account for liquidity constraints.

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