Deadlock Detection and Avoidance for Shared Logical Resources

Logical resources are defined as shared passive entities that can be concurrently accessed by multiple processes. Concurrency restrictions depend upon the mode or manner in which a process may manipulate a resource. Models incorporating these single unit resources can be used to analyze information locking for consistency and integrity purposes. Mode compatibility is defined and used to derive dead-lock detection and avoidance methods. These methods generalize well-known deadlock results for single unit resources by permitting greater concurrency while still guaranteeing data consistency. This model is applicable to the standard shared (read-only) and exclusive (read-write) access modes as well as a useful subset of those proposed in the CODASYL DBMS report.