Establish lock hierarchies, use timeout mechanisms, and avoid nested locks when possible.

To handle deadlocks in concurrent systems:

• Avoid circular waits (use a consistent lock order)

• Use timeouts or try-locks to detect and recover

• Implement deadlock detection with a wait-for graph

• Limit lock scope and hold locks for minimal time

These strategies help prevent or resolve deadlocks efficiently.

You handle deadlocks in concurrent systems by designing how your processes acquire and release resources so they never end up waiting on each other forever. A common approach is prevention, where you impose a strict order for locking resources so cycles can’t form, or avoidance, where you check requests dynamically (like with the Banker’s Algorithm) and only grant them if the system stays safe. Detection and recovery is another method, where you let deadlocks happen but monitor for cycles in the wait graph and then roll back or restart one process to break it. In practice, you also reduce risk by holding locks for as short a time as possible, using timeouts, or relying on higher-level concurrency primitives that manage locks for you.

How to Handle Deadlocks in Concurrent Systems

1. Order resource acquisition – Always lock resources in a fixed global order.

2. Use timeouts – Avoid waiting forever by timing out lock attempts.

3. Detect and recover – Allow deadlocks, detect cycles, and recover by aborting threads.

4. Use non-blocking synchronization – Prefer atomic operations over locks.

5. Use lock hierarchies – Acquire locks in increasing order of priority.

6. Single global lock – Simple approach that avoids deadlocks but limits concurrency.

Goal: Break at least one of the four deadlock conditions: Mutual Exclusion, Hold and Wait, No Preemption, Circular Wait