Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun computing A condition resembling
deadlock in which the variousprocesses are constantly changing state but never reach a situation where any of them can proceed.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
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Examples
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The wrong input at the wrong moment could trigger a race condition, or a deadlock, a livelock, or some other concurrency hazard that brings it all down.
Ars Technica Jon Stokes 2010
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High CPU utilization with no sign of real work being done is a classic warning sign of a livelock.
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In particular, polling reduces the overhead for context switches which is iincurred when servicing interrupts, and gives more control on the scheduling of the CPU between various tasks (user processes, software interrupts, device handling) which ultimately reduces the chances of livelock in the system.
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Even if one assumes that writing a transaction is conceptually easier than acquiring a lock, and even if one further assumes that transaction-based pathologies like livelock are easier on the brain than lock-based pathologies like deadlock, there remains a fatal flaw with transactional memory: much system software can never be in a transaction because it does not merely operate on memory.
Planet Sun bmc 2008
bilby commented on the word livelock
"This is similar to deadlock in that no progress is made but differs in that neither process is blocked or waiting for anything.
A human example of livelock would be two people who meet face-to-face in a corridor and each moves aside to let the other pass, but they end up swaying from side to side without making any progress because they always move the same way at the same time."
- The Jargon File, 1998.
January 22, 2009