Chapter 3: Processes

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne

 Chapter 3: Processes

1. Process Concept
2. Process Scheduling
3. Operations on Processes
4. Interprocess Communication
5. Examples of IPC Systems
6. Communication in Client-Server
Systems

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Objectives
 To introduce the notion of a process -- a
program in execution
 To describe the various features of
processes, including scheduling, creation
and termination, and communication
 To explore interprocess communication
using shared memory and message
passing
 To describe communication in client-
server systems

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 3.1 Process Concept
 An operating system executes a variety of programs (what to
call them?):
 Batch system – jobs
 Time-shared systems – user programs or tasks
 Textbook uses the terms job and process almost
interchangeably
 Process – a program in execution; process execution must
progress in sequential fashion
 Multiple parts (reside in RAM)
1. The program code, also called text section
2. Current activity including program counter, processor
registers
3. Stack containing temporary data
 Function parameters, return addresses, local variables
4. Data section containing global variables
5. Heap containing memory dynamically allocated during run
time
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process Concept (Cont.)
 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 – 9th Edition 3.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process in Memory

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process State
 As a process executes, it changes state
1. new: The process is being created
2. running: Instructions are being
executed
3. waiting: The process is waiting for
some event to occur
4. ready: The process is waiting to be
assigned to a processor
5. terminated: The process has finished
execution

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Diagram of Process State

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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 – 9th Edition 3.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Threads
 So far, process has a single thread of
execution
 Consider having multiple program
counters per process
 Multiple locations can execute at once
Multiple threads of control -> threads
 Must then have storage for thread details,
multiple program counters in PCB
 See next chapter

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process Representation in Linux

Represented by the C structure task_struct

pid t_pid; /* process identifier */

long state; /* state of the process */
unsigned int time_slice /* scheduling information */
struct task_struct *parent; /* this process’s parent */
struct list_head children; /* this process’s children */
struct files_struct *files; /* list of open files */
struct mm_struct *mm; /* address space of this process */

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 3.2 Process Scheduling
 Maximize CPU use (multiprogramming),
quickly switch processes onto CPU (time
sharing)
 Process scheduler selects among available
processes for next execution on CPU
 Maintains scheduling queues of processes
 Job queue – set of all processes in the system
 Ready queue – set of all processes residing in
main memory,
memory ready and waiting to execute
 Device queues – set of processes waiting for an
I/O device
 Processes migrate among the various queues

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Ready Queue And Various I/O Device Queues

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Representation of Process Scheduling
 Queueing diagram represents queues, resources,
flows

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Schedulers
 Short-term scheduler (or CPU scheduler) – selects
which process should be executed next and allocates
CPU
 Sometimes the only scheduler in a system
 Short-term scheduler is invoked frequently (milliseconds)  (must
be fast)
 Long-term scheduler (or job scheduler)
scheduler – selects which
processes should be brought into the ready queue
 Long-term scheduler is invoked infrequently (seconds, minutes) 
(may be slow)
 The long-term scheduler controls the degree of multiprogramming
 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
 Long-term scheduler strives for good process mix

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Addition of Medium Term Scheduling
 Medium-term scheduler can be added if degree of
multiple programming needs to decrease
 Remove process from memory, store on disk, bring
back in from disk to continue execution: swapping

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Multitasking in Mobile Systems
 Some mobile systems (e.g., early version of iOS)
allow only one process to run, others suspended
 Due to screen real estate, user interface limits iOS
provides for a
 Single foreground process- controlled via user interface
 Multiple background processes– in memory, running, but
not on the display, and with limits
 Limits include single, short task, receiving notification of
events, specific long-running tasks like audio playback
 Android runs foreground and background, with
fewer limits
 Background process uses a service to perform tasks
 Service can keep running even if background process is
suspended
 Service has no user interface, small memory use
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 CPU Switch From Process to Process

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 3.3 Operations on Processes
 The processes in most systems can
execute concurrently, and they may be
created and deleted dynamically.
 Thus, these systems must provide a
mechanism for :
 process creation,
 process termination,
 and so on as detailed next

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process Creation
 Parent process create children processes,
which, in turn create other processes, forming
a tree of processes
 Generally, process identified and managed via a
process identifier (pid)
 Resource sharing options
 Parent and children share all resources
 Children share subset of parent’s resources
 Parent and child share no resources
 Execution options
 Parent and children execute concurrently
 Parent waits until children terminate

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 A Tree of Processes in Linux

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process Creation (Cont.)
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 C Program Forking Separate Process

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Creating a Separate Process via Windows API

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process Termination
 Process executes last statement and then asks the
operating system to delete it using the exit() system
call.
 Returns status data from child to parent (via
wait())
 Process’ resources are deallocated by operating
system
 Parent may terminate the execution of children
processes using the abort() system call. Some
reasons for doing so:
 Child has exceeded allocated resources
 Task assigned to child is no longer required
 The parent is exiting and the operating systems
does not allow a child to continue if its parent
terminates
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process Termination
 Some operating systems do not allow child to exists
if its parent has terminated. If a process terminates,
then all its children must also be terminated.
 cascading termination. All children, grandchildren,
etc. are terminated.
 The termination is initiated by the operating
system.
 The parent process may wait for termination of a
child process by using the wait()system call. The
call returns status information and the pid of the
terminated process
pid = wait(&status);
 If no parent waiting (did not invoke wait()) process is a zombie
 If parent terminated without invoking wait , process is an
orphan
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Multiprocess Architecture – Chrome Browser
 Many web browsers ran as single process (some
still do)
 If one web site causes trouble, entire browser can hang or
crash
 Google Chrome Browser is multiprocess with 3
different types of processes:
 Browser process manages user interface, disk and
network I/O
 Renderer process renders web pages, deals with HTML,
Javascript. A new renderer created for each website
opened
 Runs in sandbox restricting disk and network I/O,
minimizing effect of security exploits
 Plug-in process for each type of plug-in

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 3.4 Interprocess Communication
 Processes executing concurrently in the operating
system may be either independent or cooperating
processes.
 Independent process cannot affect or be affected by
the execution of another process
 Independent process does not share data with any other
process
 Cooperating process can affect or be affected by the
execution of another process
 Cooperating process shares data with any other process
 Reasons for cooperating processes:
1. Information sharing (shared files)
2. Computation speed-up (multiprocessor system)
3. Modularity (dividing the system functions into separate processes)
4. Convenience (achieving multiple tasks on the same time; editing,
printing, and compiling in parallel)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Communications Models
Two models of IPC
Message passing & Shared memory

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Communications Models
Shared memory Message passing
 Shared memory can be  Message passing is useful
faster than message for exchanging smaller
passing, since message- amounts of data, because
passing systems are no conflicts need be
typically implemented avoided.
using system call  Message passing is easier
 system calls are to implement in a
required only to distributed system than
establish shared shared memory.
memory region.  message passing provides
 Shared memory suffers better performance than
from cache coherency shared memory on Multi
issues core systems.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Interprocess Communication – Shared Memory
 Shared memory requires communicating processes to
establish a region of shared memory.
 Typically, a shared-memory region resides in the address
space of the process creating the shared-memory segment.
 Other processes that wish to communicate using this
shared-memory segment must attach it to their address
space.
 They can then exchange information by reading and writing
data in the shared areas.
 The operating system tries to prevent one process from
accessing another process’s memory. Shared memory
requires that two or more processes agree to remove this
restriction.
 Major issues is to provide mechanism that will allow the
user processes to synchronize their actions.
 Synchronization is discussed in great details in Chapter 5.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Producer-Consumer Problem
 Paradigm for cooperating processes, producer
process produces information that is consumed by a
consumer process
 A producer process produces information that is
consumed by a consumer process.
 For example, a web server produces (that is,
provides) HTML files and images, which are
consumed (that is, read) by the client web browser
requesting the resource.
 One solution to the producer–consumer problem
uses shared memory.
 To allow producer and consumer processes to run
concurrently, we must have available a buffer of
items that can be filled by the producer and emptied
by the consumer.
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Producer-Consumer Problem
 unbounded-buffer places no practical
limit on the size of the buffer
 bounded-buffer assumes that there is
a fixed buffer size

Producer in

Out Consumer

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Producer-Consumer Problem
 This buffer will reside in a region of memory that is
shared by the producer and consumer processes.
processes
 The producer and consumer must be synchronized,
synchronized
so that the consumer does not try to consume an
item that has not yet been produced.
 Two types of buffers can be used.
 The unbounded buffer places no practical limit on
the size of the buffer. The consumer may have to
wait for new items, but the producer can always
produce new items.
 The bounded buffer assumes a fixed buffer size. In
this case, the consumer must wait if the buffer is
empty, and the producer must wait if the buffer is
full.
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Bounded-Buffer – Shared-Memory Solution
 Shared data

#define BUFFER_SIZE 10
typedef struct {
...
} item;

item buffer[BUFFER_SIZE];
int in = 0; // points to the next free
position
int out = 0; // points to the first full position

 Solution is correct, but can only use BUFFER_SIZE-1

elements
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Bounded-Buffer – Producer

item next_produced;
while (true) {
/* produce an item in next produced */
while (((in + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE) == out) ; /* do
nothing */
buffer[in] = next_produced;
in = (in + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE;
}

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Bounded Buffer – Consumer
item next_consumed;
while (true) {
while (in == out) ; /* do nothing
*/
next_consumed = buffer[out];
out = (out + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE;

/* consume the item in next consumed */

}

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.38 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Interprocess Communication – Message Passing
 Message passing provides a mechanism to allow
processes to communicate and to synchronize their
actions without sharing the same address space.
 It is
particularly useful in a distributed
environment, where the communicating processes
may reside on different computers connected by a
network.
network
 For example, an Internet chat program, that chat
participants communicate with one another by
exchanging messages.
 A message-passing facility provides at least two
operations:
 send(message)
 receive(message)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.39 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Message Passing (Cont.)

 If processes P and Q wish to communicate,

they need to:
 Establish a communication link between them
 Exchange messages via send/receive
 Implementation issues:
 How are links established?
 Can a link be associated with more than two
processes?
processes
 How many links can be between every pair of
communicating processes?
 What is the capacity of a link?
 Is the size of a message that the link can
accommodate fixed or variable?
 Is a link unidirectional or bi-directional?
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.40 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Message Passing (Cont.)

 Implementation of communication link

 Physical:
Physical
Shared memory

Hardware bus
Network
 Logical:
Logical
 Direct or indirect

 Synchronous or asynchronous
 Automatic or explicit buffering

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.41 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Direct Communication
 Processes must name each other explicitly
(symmetry):
 send (P, message) – send a message to process P
 receive Q, message) – receive a message from Q
receive(
 Properties of communication link
 Links are established automatically. The processes need to
know only each other’s identity to communicate.
communicate
 A link is associated with exactly one pair of processes
 Between each pair there exists exactly one link
 The link may be unidirectional,
unidirectional but is usually bi-directional
 asymmetry in addressing. only the sender names the
recipient; the recipient is not required to name the
sender.
 send (P, message) – send a message to process P
 receive id, message) – receive a message from any process
receive(
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.42 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Indirect Communication
 Messages are directed and received from
mailboxes (also referred to as ports)
ports
 Each mailbox has a unique id
 A mailbox can be viewed abstractly as an object into
which messages can be placed by processes and from
which messages can be removed.
 Processes can communicate only if they share a
mailbox
 Mailbox could belong to the process or the OS
 Properties of communication link
 Link established only if processes share a common
mailbox
 A link may be associated with many processes
 Each pair of processes may share several
communication links
 Link may be unidirectional or bi-directional Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.43
 Indirect Communication
 Operations
 create a new mailbox (port)
 send and receive messages through mailbox
 destroy a mailbox
 Primitives are defined as:
send(A, message) – send a message to mailbox A
receive(A, message) – receive a message from
mailbox A
 A mailbox can be viewed as an object into which
messages can be placed by processes and from
which messages can be removed.
 Each mailbox has a unique identification.
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.44 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Indirect Communication
 Mailbox sharing
 P1, P2, and P3 share mailbox A
 P1, sends; P2 and P3 receive
 Who gets the message?
 Solutions
 Allow a link to be associated with at most two
processes
 Allow only one process at a time to execute a
receive operation
 Allow the system to select arbitrarily the
receiver.
receiver Sender is notified who the receiver
was.
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.45 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Synchronization
 Message passing may be either blocking or non-
blocking
 Blocking is considered synchronous
 Blocking send -- the sender is blocked until the message is
received
 Blocking receive -- the receiver is blocked until a message
is available
 Non-blocking is considered asynchronous
 Non-blocking send -- the sender sends the message and
continue
 Non-blocking receive -- the receiver receives:
 A valid message, or
 Null message
 Different combinations possible
 If both send and receive are blocking, we have a rendezvous
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.46 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Synchronization (Cont.)
 Producer-consumer becomes trivial

message next_produced;
while (true) {
/* produce an item in next produced */
send(next_produced);
}

message next_consumed;
while (true) {
receive(next_consumed);

/* consume the item in next consumed */

}

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.47 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Buffering
 Whether communication is direct or
indirect, messages exchanged by
communicating processes reside in a
temporary queue.
 Basically, such queues can be
implemented in three ways:
1. Zero capacity – no messages are queued on a
link.
Sender must wait for receiver (rendezvous)
2. Bounded capacity – finite length of n
messages
Sender must wait if link full
3. Unbounded capacity – infinite length
Sender never waits
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.48 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 3.5 Examples of IPC Systems - POSIX
 POSIX Shared Memory
 Process first creates shared memory segment
shm_fd = shm_open(name, O CREAT | O RDWR,
0666);
 Also used to open an existing segment to
share it
 Set the size of the object
ftruncate(shm fd, 4096);
 Now the process could write to the shared
memory
sprintf(shared memory, "Writing to shared
memory");

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.49 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 IPC POSIX Producer

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.50 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 IPC POSIX Consumer

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.51 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Examples of IPC Systems - Mach
 Mach communication is message based
 Even system calls are messages
 Each task gets two mailboxes at creation- Kernel and
Notify
 Only three system calls needed for message transfer
msg_send(), msg_receive(), msg_rpc()
 Mailboxes needed for commuication, created via
port_allocate()
 Send and receive are flexible, for example four options
if mailbox full:
 Wait indefinitely
 Wait at most n milliseconds
 Return immediately
 Temporarily cache a message
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.52 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Examples of IPC Systems – Windows
 Message-passing centric via advanced local
procedure call (LPC) facility
 Only works between processes on the same system
 Uses ports (like mailboxes) to establish and maintain
communication channels
 Communication works as follows:
 The client opens a handle to the subsystem’s
connection port object.
 The client sends a connection request.
 The server creates two private communication
ports and returns the handle to one of them to the
client.
 The client and server use the corresponding port
handle to send messages or callbacks and to listen
for replies.
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.53 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Local Procedure Calls in Windows

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.54 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 3.6 Communications in Client-Server Systems

 Sockets
 Remote Procedure Calls (Java RMI)
 Pipes

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.55 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Sockets
 An socket is a combination of an IP address and a port
number. The socket [Link]:1625 refers to port
1625 on host [Link]
 A socket is one endpoint of a two-way communication
link between two processes running on the network. A
socket is bound to a port number so that the TCP layer
can identify the application that data is destined to be
sent to.
 When a client process initiates a request for a
connection, it is assigned a port by its host computer.
This port has some arbitrary number greater than 1024.
 All ports below 1024 are well known, used for standard
services (FTP, HTTP, telnet, …..)
 Special IP address [Link] (loopback) to refer to
system on which process is running

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.56 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Socket Communication

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.57 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Client / Server Communication

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.58 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Sockets in Java
 Three types of sockets
 Connection-oriented
(TCP)
 Connectionless (UDP)
 MulticastSocket
class– data
 can be sent to
multiple recipients

 Consider this “Date”

server:

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.59 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.60 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Remote Procedure Calls
 Remote procedure call (RPC) abstracts procedure calls
between processes on networked systems. It uses ports
for service differentiation and a message-based scheme.
 Each message is addressed to an RPC daemon listening
to a port on the remote system, and each contains an
identifier specifying the function to execute and the
parameters to pass to that function.
 The semantics of RPCs allows a client to invoke a
procedure on a remote host as it would invoke a
procedure locally.
 Stubs – client-side proxy for the procedure on the server
 The client stub locates the server and marshals the
parameters
 The server stub receives this message, unpacks the
marshalled parameters, and performs the procedure on
the server

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.61 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Marshalling Parameters

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.62 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Remote Procedure Calls Issues
 Data representation handled via External Data
Representation (XDL) (machine independent format) to
account for different architectures
 Big-endian and little-endian
 Remote communication has more failure scenarios than
local or be duplicated and executed more than once
 Messages can be delivered exactly once rather than at most
once
 The server must keep a history of all the timestamps of
messages it has already processed or a history large enough to
ensure that repeated messages are detected.
 The RPC scheme requires a binding of client and server
port, but how does a client know the server port
numbers?
 Fixed port addresses (compile time)
 Matchmaker mechanism (dynamic)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.63 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Execution of RPC

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.64 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Pipes
 Acts as a conduit allowing two processes to
communicate
 Issues:
 Is communication unidirectional or bidirectional?
 In the case of two-way communication, is it half or full-
duplex?
 Must there exist a relationship (i.e., parent-child)
between the communicating processes?
 Can the pipes be used over a network?
 Ordinary pipes – cannot be accessed from
outside the process that created it. Typically, a
parent process creates a pipe and uses it to
communicate with a child process.
 Named pipes – can be accessed without a
parent-child relationship.
3.65 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition
 Ordinary Pipes
 Ordinary Pipes allow communication in standard producer-
consumer style
 Producer writes to one end (the write-end of the pipe)
 Consumer reads from the other end (the read-end of the pipe)
 Ordinary pipes are therefore unidirectional
 Require parent-child relationship between communicating
processes

 Windows calls these anonymous pipes

 See Unix and Windows code samples in textbook
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.66 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Named Pipes
 Named Pipes are more powerful than ordinary
pipes
 Communication is bidirectional
 No parent-child relationship is necessary between
the communicating processes
 Several processes can use the named pipe for
communication
 Provided on both UNIX and Windows systems
 Named pipes are referred to as FIFOs in UNIX
systems. Once created, they appear as typical
files in the file system.
 A FIFO is created with the mkfifo() system call
and manipulated with the ordinary open(), read(),
write(), and close() system calls
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.67 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Homework
 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.5, 3.8, 3.9, 3.13, 3.14,
3.16, 3.17

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.68 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 End of Chapter 3

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne