System Software 1. What is meant by disabling interrupt mechanism?

"Disabling interrupts, another mechanism that achieves mutual exclusion, is a mechanism where a process disables interrupts before entering the critical section and enables the interrupt immediately after exiting the critical section. Mutual exclusions is achieved because a process is not interrupted during the execution of its critical section and thus excludes all other processes from entering their critical section. The problems with this method are that it is applicable to only uniprocessor systems and important input-output events may be mishandled."

2. What are the differences between livelock and deadlock? A livelock is similar to a deadlock, except that the states of the processes involved in the livelock constantly change with regard to one another, none progressing. Livelock is a special case of resource starvation; the general definition only states that a specific process is not progressing. A real-world example of livelock occurs when two people meet in a narrow corridor, and each tries to be polite by moving aside to let the other pass, but they end up swaying from side to side without making any progress because they both repeatedly move the same way at the same time. Livelock is a risk with some algorithms that detect and recover from deadlock. If more than one process takes action, the deadlock detection algorithm can be repeatedly triggered. This can be avoided by ensuring that only one process (chosen randomly or by priority) takes action.

Deadlock is a situation when two processes, each having a lock on one piece of data, attempt to acquire a lock on the other's piece. Each process would wait indefinitely for the other to release the lock, unless one of the user processes is terminated. SQL Server detects deadlocks and terminates one user's process.

A livelock is one, where a request for an exclusive lock is repeatedly denied because a series of overlapping shared locks keeps interfering. SQL Server detects the situation after four denials and refuses further shared locks. A livelock also occurs when read transactions monopolize a table or page, forcing a write transaction to wait indefinitely

3. What are the two major differences between deadlock and starvation?

Deadlock: Two processes are said to be in deadlock situation if process A holding onto resources required for process B and where as B holding onto the resources required for process A. Starvation: This is mostly happens in time sharing systems in which the process which requires less time slot is waiting for the large process to finish and to release the resources, but the large process holding the resources for long time (almost for forever) and the process that requires small time slot goes on waiting. Such situation is starvation for small process