Deadlock Handling

The UNIX locking facilities provide deadlock detection and avoidance. Deadlocks can occur only when the system is ready to put a record-locking interface to sleep. A search is made to determine whether two processes are in a deadlock. If a potential deadlock is detected, the locking interface fails and sets errno to indicate deadlock. Processes setting locks that use F_SETLK do not cause a deadlock because these processes do not wait when the lock cannot be granted immediately.