The simplest approach is the ostrich algorithm: stick your head in the sand and pretend there is no problem.† People react to this strategy in different ways. Mathematicians find it unacceptable and say that deadlocks must be prevented at all costs. Engineers ask how often the problem is expected, how often the system crashes for other reasons, and how serious a deadlock is. If deadlocks occur on the average once every five years, but system crashes due to hardware failures and operating system bugs occur once a week, most engineers would not be willing to pay a large penalty in performance or convenience to eliminate deadlocks.

To make this contrast more specific, consider an operating system that blocks the caller when an open system call on a physical device such as a 3D scanner or a printer cannot be carried out because the device is busy. Typically it is up to the device driver to decide what action to take under such circumstances. Blocking or returning an error code are two obvious possibilities. If one process successfully opens the scanner and another successfully opens the printer and then each process tries to open the other one and blocks trying, we have a deadlock. Few current systems will detect this.