In starvation, a process is not able to get its required resources for a very long period of time. Aging is used to avoid starvation. In aging based on the waiting time in the ready queue, the priority of the task in the ready queue is increased gradually.

Scope

This article explains starvation and aging in OS in detail.

Definition

Priority scheduling suffers from the problem of starvation. It is the situation in which the continuous arrival of a high priority process keeps the lowest priority process always in the waiting for state and the waiting process will starve in other words, the deadline of the waiting process will never meet. Starvation is indefinite blocking. A low priority process in a ready state keeps waiting for CPU allocation because of some high priority processes. And this low-priority process keeps waiting indefinitely for the CPU. This leads to starvation. Aging is used to avoid starvation

Aging technique: In aging technique, OS periodically increases the priority of the incoming process. Thus the priority of the incoming process increases indirectly. Aging is used to ensure that a low-priority process will eventually complete its execution. 

Summary

When the processes are selected on the basis of priority it might happen that low priority process never gets selected and keeps on waiting. This phenomenon is called starvation. To avoid starvation we use the aging technique. In the aging technique, we increase the priority of the processes gradually that are waiting for a long time for execution thereby ensuring the low priority tasks get executed.

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