I can see one use that when using lock ordering to prevent deadlocks (http://tutorials.jenkov.com/java-concurrency/deadlock-preven...), but then, the locks to be taken are a fixed set, and one probably would have function take_locks(lock *) and release_locks(lock *), and one could do defer release_locks.
“In most systems, this information is unavailable, making it impossible to implement the Banker's algorithm. Also, it is unrealistic to assume that the number of processes is static since in most systems the number of processes varies dynamically”
Also, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlock, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlock_prevention_algorithms) doesn’t seem to know about it. Even though I expect/guess it to be popular in embedded work, that makes me wonder whether lock ordering is used much.
Could also be an omission in Wikipedia. It has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banker%27s_algorithm, which I hadn’t heard of, and that Wikipedia says of
“In most systems, this information is unavailable, making it impossible to implement the Banker's algorithm. Also, it is unrealistic to assume that the number of processes is static since in most systems the number of processes varies dynamically”