18.5. The dining philosophers problem
The discussion above is equally appropriate to resource allocation by operating systems and data object management by a DBMS. The following example demonstrates its applicability to a small concurrent program.
This problem was posed by Dijkstra (1965) and is a classic of concurrent programming:
Five (male) philosophers spend their lives thinking and eating. The philosophers share a common circular table surrounded by five chairs, each belonging to one philosopher. In the centre of the table there is a bowl of spaghetti, and the table is laid with five forks, as shown in Figure 18.3. When a philosopher thinks, he does not interact with other philosophers. From time to time, a philosopher gets hungry. In order ...
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