Handling Deadlocks: Avoidance

Consider a slightly different state with 3 processes and 12 disks:

Process	Maximum Needed:	Currently Allocated:	Available:
P0	10	5	2
P1	4	2
P2	9	3

Although process P₁ can safely use 2 of the available disks to finish its work, the 4 disks that will become available after P₁ finishes executing won't satisfy the requests of neither of P₀ nor P₂ since 10 - 5 = 5 > 4 and 9 - 3 = 6 > 4, so there are not enough available disks for these requests.

In other words, this is an unsafe state. This, however, doesn't mean that we will get a deadlock, as some of the processes might release the used resources voluntarily, which will increase the number of available disks, and therefore never cause a deadlock.