Interview Q&A / Operating Systems
Operating Systems interview questions
Processes, threads, scheduling, memory and deadlocks, in plain words.
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- What is a race condition, and what is the critical section problem?
A race condition happens when two or more threads access shared data at the same time and the result depends on the exact timing of their steps. The critical section is the part of code that touches that shared data, and the critical section problem is designing a way so only one thread runs it at a time, with progress and bounded waiting.
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