Deadlock refers to a specific condition when two or more processes are each waiting for the other to release a resource, or more than two processes are waiting for resources in a circular chain (see Necessary conditions). Deadlock is a common problem in multiprocessing where many processes share a specific type of mutually exclusive resource known as a software lock or soft lock. Computers intended for the time-sharing and/or real-time markets are often equipped with a hardware lock (or hard lock) which guarantees exclusive access to processes, forcing serialized access. Deadlocks are particularly troubling because there is no general solution to avoid (soft) deadlocks.

This post is dedicated to all the fellow computer engineering students (especially in India) who are still having a good time by bunking the classes but not doing good enough to become a world class computer engineer otherwise.