Chapter 8: Deadlocks

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Chapter Objectives

 To develop a description of deadlocks, which prevent sets of concurrent

processes from completing their tasks

 To present a number of different methods for preventing or avoiding

deadlocks in a computer system

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 System Model

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 System Model

 System consists of resources

 Resource types R1, R2, . . ., Rm

CPU cycles, memory space, I/O devices

 Each resource type Ri has Wi instances.

 Each process utilizes a resource as follows:

 request
 use
 release

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Deadlock Characterization

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Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Deadlock Characterization
Deadlock can arise if four conditions hold simultaneously:

 Mutual exclusion: only one process at a time can use a resource

 Hold and wait: a process holding at least one resource is waiting

to acquire additional resources held by other processes

 No preemption: a resource can be released only voluntarily by the

process holding it, after that process has completed its task

 Circular wait: there exists a set {P0, P1, …, Pn} of waiting

processes such that P0 is waiting for a resource that is held by P1,
P1 is waiting for a resource that is held by P2, …, Pn–1 is waiting for
a resource that is held by Pn, and Pn is waiting for a resource that is
held by P0.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Resource-Allocation Graph (RAG)
A set of vertices V and a set of edges E:
 V is partitioned into two types:
 P = {P1, P2, …, Pn}, the set consisting of all the processes in the
system

 R = {R1, R2, …, Rm}, the set consisting of all resource types in

the system

 request edge – directed edge Pi  Rj

 assignment edge – directed edge Rj  Pi

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Resource-Allocation Graph (Cont.)
 Process

 Resource Type with 4 instances

 Pi requests instance of Rj

Pi
Rj
 Pi is holding an instance of Rj

Pi
Rj

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Example of a RAG

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 Example of a RAG with Deadlock

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 Example of a RAG without Deadlock

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 Basic Facts

 If graph contains no cycles  no deadlock

 If graph contains a cycle 

 if only one instance per resource type, then deadlock
 if several instances per resource type, possibility of deadlock (i.e.,
the cycle is a necessary but not a sufficient condition)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Methods for Handling Deadlocks

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 Methods for Handling Deadlocks

 Ensure that the system will never enter a deadlock state:

 Deadlock prevention
 Deadlock avoidance

 Allow the system to enter a deadlock state and then recover

 Ignore the problem and pretend that deadlocks never occur in the
system; used by most operating systems, including UNIX

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Deadlock Prevention

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 Deadlock Prevention
Restrain the ways request can be made

 Mutual Exclusion – not required for sharable resources (e.g., read-

only files); must hold for non-sharable resources

 Hold and Wait – must guarantee that whenever a process requests

a resource, it does not hold any other resources
 Require process to request and be allocated all its resources
before it begins execution, or allow process to request resources
only when the process has none allocated to it.
 Low resource utilization; starvation possible

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Deadlock Prevention (Cont.)
 No Preemption –
 If a process that is holding some resources requests another
resource that cannot be immediately allocated to it, then all
resources currently being held are released
 Preempted resources are added to the list of resources for which
the process is waiting
 Process will be restarted only when it can regain its old resources,
as well as the new ones that it is requesting

 Circular Wait – impose a total ordering of all resource types, and

require that each process requests resources in an increasing order of
enumeration

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Deadlock Avoidance

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 Deadlock Avoidance
Requires that the system has some additional a priori information
available
 Simplest and most useful model requires that each process
declares the maximum number of resources of each type that it
may need

 The deadlock-avoidance algorithm dynamically examines the

resource-allocation state to ensure that there can never be a
circular-wait condition

 Resource-allocation state is defined by

 The number of available and allocated resources
 And the maximum demands of the processes

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Safe State

 When a process requests an available resource, the system must

decide if immediate allocation leaves the system in a safe state

 The system is in a safe state if there exists a sequence <P1, P2, …,

Pn> of ALL the processes in the systems such that for each Pi, the
resources that Pi can still request can be satisfied by currently available
resources and resources held by all the Pj, with j < i

 That is:
 If Pi resource needs are not immediately available, then Pi can wait
until all Pj have finished
 When Pj is finished, Pi can obtain needed resources, execute,
return allocated resources, and terminate
 When Pi terminates, Pi +1 can obtain its needed resources, and so
on

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Basic Facts

 If a system is in safe state  no deadlocks

 If a system is in unsafe state  possibility of deadlock

 Avoidance  ensure that a system will never enter an unsafe state.

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 Safe, Unsafe, Deadlock State

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 Avoidance Algorithms

 Single instance of a resource type

 Use a resource-allocation graph

 Multiple instances of a resource type

 Use the banker’s algorithm

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 Resource-Allocation Graph Scheme
 Claim edge Pi  Rj indicates that process Pi may request resource Rj;
represented by a dashed line

 Claim edge converts to a request edge when a process requests a

resource

 Request edge converts to an assignment edge when the resource is

allocated to the process

 When a resource is released by a process, assignment edge reconverts

to a claim edge

 Resources must be claimed a priori in the system

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 RAG

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 Unsafe State

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 RAG Algorithm

 Suppose that process Pi requests a resource Rj

 The request can be granted only if converting the request edge to an

assignment edge does not result in the formation of a cycle in the
resource allocation graph

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Banker’s Algorithm
 Multiple instances

 Each process must a priori claim maximum use

 When a process requests a resource, it may have to wait

 When a process gets all its resources, it must return them in

a finite amount of time

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 Deadlock Detection and Recovery

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 Deadlock Detection and Recovery

 Allow system to enter deadlock state

 Detection algorithm

 Recovery scheme

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 Single Instance of Each Resource Type

 Maintain wait-for graph

 Nodes are processes
 Pi  Pj if Pi is waiting for Pj

 Periodically invoke an algorithm that searches for a cycle in the graph.

 If there is a cycle, there exists a deadlock

 An algorithm to detect a cycle in a graph requires an order of n2

operations, where n is the number of vertices in the graph

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 Resource-Allocation Graph and Wait-for Graph

Resource-Allocation Graph Corresponding Wait-for Graph

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 Several Instances of a Resource Type

 Available: A vector of length m indicates the number of available

resources of each type

 Allocation: An n x m matrix defines the number of resources of each

type currently allocated to each process

 Request: An n x m matrix indicates the current request of each

process.
 If Request [ i ][ j ] = k, then process Pi is requesting k more
instances of resource type Rj.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Detection Algorithm

1. Let Work and Finish be vectors of length m and n, respectively

Initialize:
(a) Work = Available
(b) For i = 1, 2, …, n, if Allocationi  0, then
Finish[i] = false; otherwise, Finish[i] = true

2. Find an index i such that both:

(a) Finish[i] == false
(b) Requesti  Work

If no such i exists, go to step 4

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Detection Algorithm (Cont.)
3. Work = Work + Allocationi
Finish[i] = true
go to step 2

4. If Finish[i] == false, for some i, 1  i  n, then the system is in

deadlock state. Moreover, if Finish[i] == false, then Pi is
deadlocked

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 Detection-Algorithm Usage
 When, and how often, to invoke depends on:
 How often a deadlock is likely to occur?
 How many processes will need to be rolled back?
 one for each disjoint cycle

 If detection algorithm is invoked arbitrarily, there may be many cycles in

the resource graph and so we would not be able to tell which of the
many deadlocked processes “caused” the deadlock.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.39 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Recovery from Deadlock: Process Termination

 Abort all deadlocked processes

 Abort one process at a time until the deadlock cycle is eliminated

 In which order should we choose to abort?

1. Priority of the process
2. How long process has computed, and how much longer to
completion
3. Resources the process has used
4. Resources process needs to complete
5. How many processes will need to be terminated
6. Is process interactive or batch?

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.40 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Recovery from Deadlock: Resource Preemption

 Selecting a victim – minimize cost

 Rollback – return to some safe state, restart process for that state

 Starvation – same process may always be picked as victim, include

number of rollbacks in cost factor

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 8.41 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 End of Chapter 8

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018