Process Synchronization in OS (Operating System)

When two or more process cooperates with each other, their order of execution must be preserved otherwise there can be conflicts in their execution and inappropriate outputs can be produced.

A cooperative process is the one which can affect the execution of other process or can be affected by the execution of other process. Such processes need to be synchronized so that their order of execution can be guaranteed.

The procedure involved in preserving the appropriate order of execution of cooperative processes is known as Process Synchronization. There are various synchronization mechanisms that are used to synchronize the processes.

Race Condition

A Race Condition typically occurs when two or more threads try to read, write and possibly make the decisions based on the memory that they are accessing concurrently.

Critical Section

The regions of a program that try to access shared resources and may cause race conditions are called critical section. To avoid race condition among the processes, we need to assure that only one process at a time can execute within the critical section.