The dining philosophers problem is a famous problem in computer science. It is a metaphor to help people to understand multi-threaded(concurrent) systems and problems with shared memory blocks.
- There is a round table and a meal in the middle.
- There are N philosophers around the table.
- Philosophers have 3 states(with order): eat, sleep, and think.
- If philosophers cannot eat enough often, they die.
- Every philosopher should eat and not die.
- There are sticks between each philosopher. One for the right and one for the left. Totally N sticks exist.
- Philosophers can only take sticks from his right and left ones.
- Philosophers need 2 sticks to eat. Because these are not spoons or forks. These are sticks in the end lol.
- So if all of the philosophers take one stick at the same time everybody will starve. (which state we call 'deadlock' in computer science.)
Let's break down what the problem means on the technical side.
- Every philosopher is a thread/process.
- Every stick is a mutex lock.
- The meal is a critical section.
- Clone this repository.
- Use the
makecommand to compile. - You'll get an executable file named
philo. Run it with arguments.
Arguments: ./philo <philosopher count> <time to die> <time to eat> <time to sleep> [must eat count]
Times must be specified as milliseconds.