Information Technology Institute

Operating System Fundamentals

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Chapter Four
PROCESSES

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 Table of Content

• Process Concept
• Process Scheduling
• Operations on Processes
• Threads
• Cooperating Processes
• Inter-process Communication

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PROCESS CONCEPT

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 Process Concept

• Process – a program in execution; process

execution must progress in sequential fashion.
• An operating system executes a variety of
programs:
• Batch system
• Time-shared systems

* Textbook uses the terms job and process almost

interchangeably

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 Process Contents
• Text section
• Program instructions

• Program counter
• Next instruction

• Stack
• Local variables
• Return addresses
• Method parameters

• Data section
• Global variables
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Process State

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 Process State Cont’d

• As a process executes, it changes state

• new: The process is being created.
• running: Instructions are being executed.
• waiting: The process is waiting for some event to
occur.
• ready: The process is waiting to be assigned to a
processor.
• terminated: The process has finished execution.

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 Process Control Block (PCB)

• Information associated with each process.

• Process state
• Program counter
• CPU registers
• CPU scheduling information
• Memory-management information
• Accounting information
• I/O status information
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Process Control Block (PCB) Cont’d
Pointer Process state

Process number

Program counter

CPU registers

Memory management info

I/O status information

Accounting Information

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CPU Switch From Process to
Process

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PROCESS SCHEDULING

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 Process Scheduling

• Multi-Programming systems
• Some processes executing at all times
• Maximize CPU utilization

• Time-Sharing systems
• Switch the CPU among processes frequently
• Users can interact with a program while it’s
executing
• Virtually run processes at the same time
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 Process Scheduling Queues

• Job queue
• set of all processes in the system.
• Ready queue
• set of all processes residing in main memory which is
ready and waiting to execute.
• Device queues
• set of processes waiting for an I/O device.

* Process migration between the various queues

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Ready Queue And Various I/O
Device Queues

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 Representation of Process
Scheduling
in
out
Ready queue CPU

I/O I/O queue I/O request

time slice
expired

child executes fork a child

wait for an
interrupt occurs
interrupt
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 Schedulers

• Long-term scheduler (or job scheduler)

• Selects which processes should be brought into
the ready queue.
• Executes infrequently
• May be absent in some O/S
• Short-term scheduler (or CPU scheduler)
• Selects which process should be executed next
and allocates CPU.
• Executes frequently
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Addition of Medium Term
Scheduling

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 Schedulers Cont’d
• Processes can be described as either:
• I/O-bound process
• spends more time doing I/O than computations, many short CPU bursts.
• CPU-bound process
• spends more time doing computations; few very long CPU bursts.

• Proper System performance

• Mix of CPU & I/O bound processes

• Improper system performance

• All processes are I/O bound
• All processes are CPU bound© Copyright Information Technology Institute - 2022 19
 Context Switch

• When CPU switches to another process, the

system must save the state of the old process
and load the saved state for the new process.
• Context-switch time is overhead; the system
does no useful work while switching.
• Time dependent on hardware support.

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OPERATIONS ON PROCESSES

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 Operations on Processes

• Process Creation
• Process Termination

* Process resources
• CPU time
• Memory
• Files
• I/O devices

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 Process Creation
Process n
Process n

Process n+1
Process n+1 Process n+2

Process n+2
Process n+3

Process n+3
Process n+4

Process n+4
Process n+5 Process n+6

Process n+5
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 Process Creation Cont’d

• Parent process create children processes, which,

in turn create other processes, forming a tree of
processes.
• Resource sharing
• Parent and children share all resources.
• Children share subset of parent’s resources.

• Execution
• Parent and children execute concurrently.
• Parent waits until children terminate.
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 Process Creation Cont’d

• Address space
• Child duplicate of parent.
• Child has a program loaded into it.
• UNIX examples
• fork system call creates new process
• exec system call used after a fork to replace the
process’ memory space with a new program.

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 Process Termination

• Process executes last statement and asks the operating

system to decide it (exit).
• Output data from child to parent.
• Process’ resources are de-allocated by operating system.
• Parent may terminate execution of children processes
(abort).
• Child has exceeded allocated resources.
• Task assigned to child is no longer required.
• Parent is exiting.
• Operating system does not allow child to continue if its parent
terminates.
• Cascading termination.
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 Threads

• Many modern operating systems now provide

features for a process to contain multiple
threads of control instead of a single Thread

• A thread, sometimes called a lightweight

process (LWP)

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 Threads

• It shares with other threads belonging to the

same process its code section, data section,
and other operating-system resources, such as
open files

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 Threads

• Benefits:
1. Responsiveness

2. Resource sharing

3. Economy

4. Utilization of multiprocessor architectures

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 Multi Threading Models

• Many-to-One Model:

• Maps many user-level threads to one kernel thread.

• Thread Management is done in user space, so it is efficient

• The entire process will block if a thread makes a blocking

system call

• Multiple threads are unable to run in parallel on

multiprocessors

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 Multi Threading Models

• One-to-one Model:

• Maps each user thread to a kernel thread.

• It provides more concurrency than the many-to-one model.

•
• Another thread can run when a thread makes a blocking system call.
•
• It also allows multiple threads to run in parallel on multiprocessors.

• The only drawback is the overhead of creating kernel threads can

burden the performance of an application.

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 Multi Threading Models

• Many-to-Many Model:
• Multiplexes many user-level threads to a smaller or
equal number of kernel threads.

• Developers can create as many user threads as

necessary, and the corresponding kernel threads can
run in parallel on a multiprocessor.

• Also, when a thread performs a blocking system call,

the kernel can schedule another thread for execution.
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 Threading Issues

• The fork and exec System Calls

• Does the new process duplicate all threads or is the new process single-threaded?
• Cancellation
• Allocating resources to a cancelled thread or cancel a thread while updating data that is
shared by another thread
• Signal Handling
• Handling signals in single-threaded programs is straightforward; signals are always
delivered to a process. However, delivering signals is more complicated in
multithreaded programs, as a process may have several threads. Where then should a
signal be delivered?
• Thread Pools
• Unlimited threads could exhaust system resources, such as CPU time or memory. One
solution to this issue is to use thread pools

• Thread-Specific Data
• Each thread might need its own copy of certain data in some circumstances.

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 Cooperating Processes

• Independent process cannot affect or be affected

by the execution of another process.
• Cooperating process can affect or be affected by
the execution of another process
• Advantages of process cooperation
• Information sharing
• Computation speed-up
• Modularity
• Convenience
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 INTER-PROCESS
COMMUNICATION
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 Inter-process Communication

• Message Passing

• Shared Memory

* Synchronization

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 Message Passing

• Messages
• Fixed size
• Variable size

• Communication
• Direct:
• send(P2, message), receive(P1, message)
• Indirect:
• send(ID, message), receive(ID, messages)
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 Synchronization

• Message passing may be either blocking or

non-blocking.
• Blocking is considered synchronous
• Non-blocking is considered asynchronous
• send and receive primitives may be either
blocking or non-blocking.

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