A race condition is an undesirable situation that occurs when two or more processes or threads attempt to access the same resource or execute the same piece of code at the same time, but because of the nature of the device or system, the operations must be done in the proper sequence to be done correctly. In the context of operating systems, a race condition can occur when many threads share a resource or execute the same piece of code in a multithreaded context.
Race conditions can cause problems in the system, such as errors reading or writing data, illegal operation of the program, or even system crashes. They are considered a common issue for multithreaded applications.
To avoid race conditions, critical sections can be treated as atomic instructions, or proper thread synchronization using locks or atomic variables can be employed. Symptoms of a race condition include unpredictable values of variables that are shared between multiple threads.
