Final answer:
Deadlock prevention refers to strategies that ensure at least one of the necessary conditions for a deadlock does not occur, aiming to prevent deadlocks by addressing mutual exclusion, hold and wait, no preemption, and circular wait.
Step-by-step explanation:
Deadlock prevention is a set of methods used to ensure that at least one of the necessary conditions for a deadlock cannot hold. This set of methods attempts to systematically circumvent the circumstances that typically lead to a deadlock in a computing environment. The necessary conditions for a deadlock include mutual exclusion, hold and wait, no preemption, and circular wait.
Option (a) 'to ensure that at least one of the necessary conditions cannot hold' reflects the aim of deadlock prevention techniques. This may be achieved by ensuring that when a process requests a resource, it is either granted immediately or forced to release any other resources it holds, thereby preventing the 'hold and wait' condition. Alternatively, prevention strategies might allow preemption of resources, or ensure that resources are requested in a predefined order to avoid a circular wait scenario..