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Theory as well as a simulation to explain the Producer Consumer problem within the OS

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Producer Consumer Problem

Producer Consumer Problem

Producer Consumer Problem

    The Producer-Consumer problem is a classic synchronization problem in operating systems. The problem is defined as follows: there is a fixed-size buffer and a Producer process, and a Consumer process. The Producer process creates an item and adds it to the shared buffer.
    There is one Producer in the producer-consumer problem, Producer is producing some items, whereas there is one Consumer that is consuming the items produced by the Producer. The same memory buffer is shared by both producers and consumers which is of fixed-size The task of the Producer is to produce the item, put it into the memory buffer, and again start producing items. Whereas the task of the Consumer is to consume the item from the memory buffer.
    • The producer should produce data only when the buffer is not full. In case it is found that the buffer is full, the producer is not allowed to store any data into the memory buffer.
    • Data can only be consumed by the consumer if and only if the memory buffer is not empty. In case it is found that the buffer is empty, the consumer is not allowed to use any data from the memory buffer.
    • Accessing memory buffer should not be allowed to producer and consumer at the same time.

F.A.Q

Frequently Asked Questions

We will be updating the rest of the questions soon

  • A bounded buffer lets multiple producers and multiple consumers share a single buffer. Producers write data to the buffer and consumers read data from the buffer. Producers must block if the buffer is full.

    In unbounded buffer producer is free to add an item into the buffer at any time: it performs wait(mutex) before appending and signal(mutex) afterwards to prevent access by the consumer. It also performs signal(number) after each append to increment number.

  • Producer consumer problem is a classical synchronization problem. We can solve this problem by using semaphores. A semaphore S is an integer variable that can be accessed only through two standard operations : wait() and signal().