Deadlock Characteristics and Solutions Research Paper

Deadlock Characteristics and Solutions - Research Paper Example When a process cannot change its situation indefinitely due to another waiting process using the same resource, then this leads to a system being in deadlock (Kaveh and Wolfgang). Under normal circumstances, resource allocations in a system undertake the following steps. A process requests a resource and the process is suspended until the resource is available. The process then uses the resource once it has been allocated. Finally, the process releases the resource. A system might have two processes running process-A and process-B namely. The situation above illustrates that Process-A and Process-B are in a deadlock state. Deadlocks have the following assumptions. The process cannot be allocated a resource before it requests for it. Therefore, the order it follows is request then use it and release the resource. A process can also only request more resources than the number of resources available for use by the system. Multiprogramming systems have a resource table than manages resources by showing free and occupied resources being used by processes. It also keeps queues of the processes that are waiting for certain resources. The queues will indicate the time a resource will be released by a process thus making it available for use by other resources. Mutual exclusion occurs when one or at least one of the resource is not sharable. It means that only a few numbers of processes can use the resource at a time. A requesting process has to wait for a resource to be released if it requests the process when it is being used by another process. To illustrate mutual exclusion, Process-A can have an exclusive control of a resource that Process-B needs and vice versa. Process-A and Process-B will block indefinitely while waiting for one process or other processes to free the resource. Mutual exclusion is not restricted to objects in the computer