The Deadlock Problem - A Review

Deadlock is a phenomenon in which a system or a part of it remains indefinitely blocked and cannot terminate its task. Such phenomenon often implies disaster in man-made system and, therefore must be carefully handled by system designers, analysts and engineers. Computer systems are prone to deadlock. Deadlock is a result to some uncontrolled sequence of release and request of resource among processes in a system. This survey paper presents some system models and deadlock handling techniques to deal with the problem. Selected algorithms are also presented to see how deadlocks can be deleted. In this paper, we are going to presents several algorithms that handle deadlock in a system. A deadlock can be resolved by aborting one or more processes in the deadlocked-set and is released, and withdraw all the resource requests it has made.