Advanced Python Programming

Implementing ranking among resources

From both the Dining Philosophers problem and our Python example, we can see that the last condition of the four Coffman conditions, circular wait, is at the heart of the problem of deadlock. It specifies that the different processes (or threads) in our concurrent program wait for resources held by other processes (or threads) in a circular manner. Giving this a closer look, we can see that the root cause for this condition is the order (or lack thereof) in which the processes (or threads) access the resources.

In the Dining Philosophers problem, each philosopher is instructed to pick up the fork on their left side first, while in our Python example, the threads always try to acquire the locks with the ...