philosophers

42/Codam introduction to multithreading

Description

A C solution to the dining philosophers problem, serving as an introduction to thread programming.
The particular constraints of the project (aside from the original problem's) are:

• philosophers may not communicate with each other;
• philosophers don't know when another is about to die;
• the death timer is reset at the beginning of eating
• when philosophers change state, an update with the current time in ms is outputted and lines may not be scrambled between philosophers;
• no more than a 10 ms delay between a philosopher's death and when this update is printed.

(see subject PDF for detailed project specifications)

Mutex locks are used to avoid dead/livelock and race conditions.

Commands

Build
Run make in the root directory.

Run
The program expects the following arguments:
number_of_philosophers time_to_die time_to_eat time_to_sleep number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat(optional)

Example:

./philo 4 310 200 100
./philo 4 410 200 200 10

Example

when a philosopher dies to a short time_to_die

when the program keeps running

Resources

A clear explanation of the dining philosophers problem

Introduction to thread programming, Dartmouth CS 50: Software Design and Implementation

POSIX Threads Programming, Blaise Barney

Creating and joining threads (video)

Passing data to and from threads (video)

Thread safety, race conditions, and mutex locks (video)

Mutex locks and avoiding deadlock