Starvation

operating-systems concurrency

Definition

Starvation

Starvation (indefinite postponement) occurs when a process is perpetually denied necessary resources (e.g., CPU time) to make progress, even though the system functions correctly. Unlike deadlock, other processes continue to execute while the victim is ignored.

Causes

Priority Scheduling

High-priority processes continually arrive, preventing low-priority processes from running.

Unfair Mutual Exclusion

A resource is always granted to a specific group of processes.

Prevention

Aging

Process priority increases the longer it waits in the ready queue, eventually ensuring it is scheduled.