Definitions and Detection of Deadlock, Livelock, and Starvation in Concurrent Programs

Abstract

Deadlock, livelock, starvation, and other terms have been used to describe undesirable situations involving blocking or not making progress for processes in a concurrent program However, definitions of these terms are inconsistent and often informal This paper provides formal definitions of deadlock, livelock, and starvation in terms of the reachability graph of a concurrent program Also, this paper shows algorithms for the detection of deadlock, livelock, and starvation.