Talk:Priority inheritance

This doesn't make sense: "Using this programming method, a process scheduling algorithm will increase the priority of a process to the maximum priority of any process waiting for any resource the process has a resource lock on." - ao

It means this: Process A is high priority, and waiting for currently-in-use resource X; process B is low priority, but currently using resource X. Under a normal scheduling system, process B will be scheduled with low priority, so it may hold resource X for a long period of time, thereby blocking high-priority process A. Priority inheritance solves this problem by raising the priority of A to that of B until A releases resource X. The observation is that when a high-priority process depends on a low-priority process running, running the otherwise low-priority process temporarily becomes a matter of high priority. Of course, this has some problems in the face of uncooperative processes: a low-priority process could purposely hold a resource it knows a high-priority process needs for much longer than necessary, in order to raise its priority artificially. [Maybe something like this should be added to the article?] --Delirium 21:39, 14 September 2005 (UTC)