Chapter 3: Processes

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Chapter 3: Processes
Process Concept
Process Scheduling
Operations on Processes
Interprocess Communication
IPC in Shared-Memory Systems
IPC in Message-Passing Systems
Examples of IPC Systems
Communication in Client-Server Systems

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Objectives
Identify the separate components of a process and illustrate
how they are represented and scheduled in an operating
system.
Describe how processes are created and terminated in an
operating system, including developing programs using the
appropriate system calls that perform these operations.
Describe and contrast interprocess communication using
shared memory and message passing.
Design programs that uses pipes and POSIX shared memory
to perform interprocess communication.
Describe client-server communication using sockets and
remote procedure calls.
Design kernel modules that interact with the Linux operating
system.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Process Concept
An operating system executes a variety of programs that run as a process.
Process – a program in execution; process execution must progress in
sequential fashion
Multiple parts
The program code, also called text section
Current activity including program counter, processor registers
Stack containing temporary data
 Function parameters, return addresses, local variables
Data section containing global variables
Heap containing memory dynamically allocated during run time
Program is passive entity stored on disk (executable file); process is active
Program becomes process when executable file loaded into memory
Execution of program started via GUI mouse clicks, command line entry of its
name, etc
One program can be several processes
Consider multiple users executing the same program
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Process in Memory

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 Memory Layout of a C Program

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 Process State

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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 Diagram of Process State

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 Process Control Block (PCB)
Information associated with each process
(also called task control block)
Process state – running, waiting, etc
Program counter – location of
instruction to next execute
CPU registers – contents of all process-
centric registers
CPU scheduling information- priorities,
scheduling queue pointers
Memory-management information –
memory allocated to the process
Accounting information – CPU used,
clock time elapsed since start, time
limits
I/O status information – I/O devices
allocated to process, list of open files

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Process Scheduling

Maximize CPU use, quickly switch processes onto CPU core

Process scheduler selects among available processes for
next execution on CPU core
Maintains scheduling queues of processes
‫مجموعة من جميع العمليات املوجودة في الذاكرة الرئيسية وجاهزة وتنتظر التنفيذ‬
Ready queue – set of all processes residing in main
memory, ready and waiting to execute
‫مجموعة من كل عملية انتظار الحدث‬
Wait queues – set of processes waiting for an event (i.e.
I/O)
Processes migrate among the various queues

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 Ready and Wait Queues

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 Representation of Process Scheduling

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 CPU Switch From Process to Process
A context switch occurs when the CPU switches from one process
to another.

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 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 via a context switch
Context of a process represented in the PCB
Context-switch time is overhead; the system does no useful
work while switching
The more complex the OS and the PCB  the longer the
context switch
Time dependent on hardware support
Some hardware provides multiple sets of registers per CPU
 multiple contexts loaded at once

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