Concurrency, Synchronization & Deadlock Questions

Correctness of shared-state coordination between concurrent threads and tasks. Covers mutexes (futex-based and spin-then-sleep), semaphores, condition variables, spinlocks, reader-writer locks, and the producer-consumer pattern; atomic operations, compare-and-swap, lock-free and wait-free structures with the ABA problem and safe memory reclamation; memory ordering, barriers and acquire/release semantics; race conditions, data races, critical sections, time-of-check to time-of-use gaps and read-modify-write hazards; deadlock (the Coffman conditions, lock ordering, prevention and detection), livelock and starvation; priority inversion as a locking hazard and the priority-inheritance fix; designing thread-safe structures such as bounded queues, caches, rate limiters, event buses and work-stealing schedulers, with coarse versus fine-grained and per-key locking; alternatives to locking such as thread confinement, message passing, actors and transactional memory; and diagnosing and testing concurrency bugs (heisenbugs, race detectors, stress and replay, reviewing concurrent code). Excludes a specific language's threading API and memory model, concurrency for throughput and pool tuning, distributed locks and consensus, database isolation levels, RTOS ceiling protocols and schedulability, and interrupt masking between ISRs and main code.

No published Concurrency, Synchronization & Deadlock questions for Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) yet

This topic is part of the Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) interview scope, but we have not published questions for it under this role yet. Browse the other topics in this category, or start a practice session to work through it interactively.