Critical Section is the part of a
program which tries to access shared resources. That resource may be any
resource in a computer like a memory location, Data structure, CPU or any IO
device.
The critical section cannot be executed
by more than one process at the same time; operating system faces the
difficulties in allowing and disallowing the processes from entering the
critical section.
The critical section problem is used to
design a set of protocols which can ensure that the Race condition among the
processes will never arise.
In order to synchronize the cooperative
processes, our main task is to solve the critical section problem. We need to
provide a solution in such a way that the following conditions can be
satisfied.
Primary
Mutual Exclusion
Our solution must provide mutual
exclusion. By Mutual Exclusion, we mean that if one process is executing inside
critical section then the other process must not enter in the critical section.
Progress
Progress means that if one process
doesn't need to execute into critical section then it should not stop other
processes to get into the critical section.
Secondary
Bounded Waiting
We should be able to predict the
waiting time for every process to get into the critical section. The process
must not be endlessly waiting for getting into the critical section.
Architectural Neutrality
Our mechanism must be
architectural natural. It means that if our solution is working fine on one
architecture then it should also run on the other ones as well.