Explain the Race Condition

The situation where various processes access - and manipulate shared data concurrently. The final value of the shared data relies upon which process finishes last. To avoid race conditions, concurrent processes should be synchronized.

Data consistency needs that just only one process should update the value of a data item at any time. This is made sure through the notion of a critical section. A critical section for data item d is a section of code that cannot be executed concurrently with itself or with another critical sections for d. Refer a system of n processes (P0, P1,...,    Pn-1), each process has a segment of code known as a critical section, in which the processes might be changing common variables, updating a table, writing a file, and so on. The significant feature of the system is that, when one process is executing in its critical section, no other process is to be permitted to execute in its critical section.

So the execution of critical sections by the processes is mutually exclusive in time.