Segement-New

microprocessors
Sazid Zaman Khan
Processes
 A process has a self-contained execution
environment. A process generally has a complete,
private set of basic run-time resources; in
particular, each process has its own memory
space.
 Processes are often seen as synonymous with
programs or applications. However, what the user
sees as a single application may in fact be a set of
cooperating processes. To facilitate
communication between processes, most
operating systems support Inter Process
Communication (IPC).
 A process is an execution stream in the context
of a particular process state.
◦ An execution stream is a sequence of instructions.
◦ Process state determines the effect of the instructions.
It usually includes (but is not restricted to):
 Registers
 Stack
 Memory (global variables and dynamically allocated
memory)
 Open file tables
 Signal management information
◦ Key concept: processes are separated: no process can
directly affect the state of another process.
 Process is a key OS abstraction that users see
- the environment you interact with when you
use a computer is built up out of processes.
◦ The shell you type stuff into is a process.
◦ When you execute a program you have just
compiled, the OS generates a process to run the
program.
◦ Your WWW browser is a process.
 Two concepts: uniprogramming and
multiprogramming.
◦ Uniprogramming: only one process at a time. Typical example:
DOS. Problem: users often wish to perform more than one
activity at a time (load a remote file while editing a program,
for example), and uniprogramming does not allow this. So DOS
and other uniprogrammed systems put in things like memory-
resident programs that invoked asynchronously, but still have
separation problems. One key problem with DOS is that there
is no memory protection - one program may write the memory
of another program, causing weird bugs.
◦ Multiprogramming: multiple processes at a time. Typical of
Unix plus all currently envisioned new operating systems.
Allows system to separate out activities cleanly.
 Multiprogramming introduces the resource
sharing problem - which processes get to use
the physical resources of the machine when?
One crucial resource:
Threads
 Thread is unit of sequential execution
 Threads are sometimes called lightweight processes.
Both processes and threads provide an execution
environment, but creating a new thread requires
fewer resources than creating a new process.
 Threads exist within a process — every process has at
least one. Threads share the process's resources,
including memory and open files. This makes for
efficient, but potentially problematic, communication.
 Multithreaded execution is an essential feature of the
Java platform. Every application has at least one
thread — or severa
Threads and processes
 The unit of resource ownership is usually referred to as
a process or task. This Processes have:
◦ a virtual address space which holds the process image.
◦ protected access to processors, other processes, files, and I/O
resources.
 The unit of dispatching is usually referred to a thread or a
lightweight process. Thus a thread:
◦ Has an execution state (running, ready, etc.)
◦ Saves thread context when not running
◦ Has an execution stack and some per-thread static storage for local
variables
◦ Has access to the memory address space and resources of its process
 all threads of a process share this when one thread alters a
(non-private) memory item, all other threads (of the process)
sees that a file open with one thread, is available to others
Benefits of using threads
 Benefits of Threads vs Processes
 Less time to terminate a thread than a process.
 Less time to switch between two threads within the
same process, partly because the newly created
thread uses the current process address space.
 Less communication overheads -- communicating
between the threads of one process is simple
because the threads share everything: address
space, in particular. So, data produced by one
thread is immediately available to all the other
threads.
 Some Example applications of threads
 Example : A file server on a LAN
 It needs to handle several file requests over a

short period
 Hence more efficient to create (and destroy) a

single thread for each request

 Multiple threads can possibly be executing

simultaneously on different processors

 Example 2: Matrix Multiplication
 Matrix Multilication essentially involves taking

the rows of one matrix and multiplying and

adding corresponding columns in a second
matrix i.e:
