Random boosting is a strategy used by the scheduler in Microsoft Windows to avoid

deadlock In concurrent computing, deadlock is any situation in which no member of some group of entities can proceed because each waits for another member, including itself, to take action, such as sending a message or, more commonly, releasing a lo ...

due to

priority inversion In computer science, priority inversion is a scenario in scheduling in which a high priority task is indirectly superseded by a lower priority task effectively inverting the assigned priorities of the tasks. This violates the priority model that h ...

. Ready threads holding locks are randomly boosted in priority and allowed to run long enough to exit the critical section. If the thread doesn't get enough time to release the lock, it will get another chance.

References

{{reflist Processor scheduling algorithms