Approaches to deadlock situations
As we have seen, deadlock can lead our concurrent programs to an infinite hang, which is undesirable in every way. In this section, we will be discussing potential approaches to prevent deadlocks from occurring. Intuitively, each approach looks to eliminate one of the four Coffman conditions from our program, in order to prevent deadlocks.
Implementing ranking among resources
From both the Dining Philosophers problem and our Python example, we can see that the last condition of the four Coffman conditions, circular wait, is at the heart of the problem of deadlock. It specifies that the different processes (or threads) in our concurrent program wait for resources held by other processes (or threads) in a circular manner. Giving this a closer look, we can see that the root cause for this condition is the order (or lack thereof) in which the processes (or threads) access the resources.
In the Dining Philosophers problem, each philosopher is instructed to pick...
