Strategies for handling Deadlock

1. Deadlock Ignorance

Deadlock Ignorance is the most widely used approach among all the mechanism. This is being used by many operating systems mainly for end user uses. In this approach, the Operating system assumes that deadlock never occurs. It simply ignores deadlock. This approach is best suitable for a single end user system where User uses the system only for browsing and all other normal stuff.

There is always a tradeoff between Correctness and performance. The operating systems like Windows and Linux mainly focus upon performance. However, the performance of the system decreases if it uses deadlock handling mechanism all the time if deadlock happens 1 out of 100 times then it is completely unnecessary to use the deadlock handling mechanism all the time.

In these types of systems, the user has to simply restart the computer in the case of deadlock. Windows and Linux are mainly using this approach.

2. Deadlock prevention

Deadlock happens only when Mutual Exclusion, hold and wait, No preemption and circular wait holds simultaneously. If it is possible to violate one of the four conditions at any time then the deadlock can never occur in the system.

The idea behind the approach is very simple that we have to fail one of the four conditions but there can be a big argument on its physical implementation in the system.

We will discuss it later in detail.

3. Deadlock avoidance

In deadlock avoidance, the operating system checks whether the system is in safe state or in unsafe state at every step which the operating system performs. The process continues until the system is in safe state. Once the system moves to unsafe state, the OS has to backtrack one step.

In simple words, The OS reviews each allocation so that the allocation doesn't cause the deadlock in the system.

We will discuss Deadlock avoidance later in detail.

4. Deadlock detection and recovery

This approach let the processes fall in deadlock and then periodically check whether deadlock occur in the system or not. If it occurs then it applies some of the recovery methods to the system to get rid of deadlock.

We will discuss deadlock detection and recovery later in more detail since it is a matter of discussion.