From my understanding, if some processes make absolutely no progress, it's starvation. If processes can still make progress but very limited compared to some other processes, it is a fairness issue but not starvation.
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wcrichto
According to Wikipedia, this is incorrect---starvation is characterized by a "severe deficiency in caloric energy, nutrient, and vitamin intake."
Starvation is usually caused by schedule policies with priority concept.
If a process with higher priority never blocks, other processes with lower priority will rarely get resources.
Another interesting example I learned from Wikipedia:
Suppose Priority(process3) > Priority(process2) > Priority(process1) and process3 has dependency on process1. If process2 holds the resource for a long time, process3 will never move forward even though it has higher priority, as it cannot get results of process1.
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devs
@chaihf I'm a bit confused by your example. The way I understand it, process1 and process3 are being starved while only process2 is progressing, but I would think that process1 would be able to run to completion once process2 releases the resource meaning process3 will also be able to move forward eventually. If you could give a link to the example, that'd be great.
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yrkumar
A special case of starvation is write-starvation in a system with a readers-writers lock that gives readers priority over writers at all times. This lock ensures that multiple readers can read a resource at the same time, but only one writer can write to the resource at a time. In this case, if there is a steady stream of readers and a writer is waiting to acquire the lock, then the writer will wait forever (or at least until the stream of readers dries up), which illustrates the principle of starvation.
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yetianx
@devs? It is called Priority inversion. The basic idea is High priority process has to wait/block for the low priority process.
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yetianx
@devs: It is called Priority inversion. The basic idea is a high priority process has to wait for/block by a low priority process. This is an important problem for the real-time system.
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DunkMaster
So, to avoid starvation in this case, we need to have some police or traffic light to guarantee the fairness.
From my understanding, if some processes make absolutely no progress, it's starvation. If processes can still make progress but very limited compared to some other processes, it is a fairness issue but not starvation.
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According to Wikipedia, this is incorrect---starvation is characterized by a "severe deficiency in caloric energy, nutrient, and vitamin intake."
(but actually Wikipedia agrees with you)
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Starvation is usually caused by schedule policies with priority concept. If a process with higher priority never blocks, other processes with lower priority will rarely get resources.
Another interesting example I learned from Wikipedia: Suppose Priority(process3) > Priority(process2) > Priority(process1) and process3 has dependency on process1. If process2 holds the resource for a long time, process3 will never move forward even though it has higher priority, as it cannot get results of process1.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
@chaihf I'm a bit confused by your example. The way I understand it, process1 and process3 are being starved while only process2 is progressing, but I would think that process1 would be able to run to completion once process2 releases the resource meaning process3 will also be able to move forward eventually. If you could give a link to the example, that'd be great.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
A special case of starvation is write-starvation in a system with a readers-writers lock that gives readers priority over writers at all times. This lock ensures that multiple readers can read a resource at the same time, but only one writer can write to the resource at a time. In this case, if there is a steady stream of readers and a writer is waiting to acquire the lock, then the writer will wait forever (or at least until the stream of readers dries up), which illustrates the principle of starvation.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
@devs? It is called Priority inversion. The basic idea is High priority process has to wait/block for the low priority process.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
@devs: It is called Priority inversion. The basic idea is a high priority process has to wait for/block by a low priority process. This is an important problem for the real-time system.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
So, to avoid starvation in this case, we need to have some police or traffic light to guarantee the fairness.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.