Chapter 3: Processes

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

 Process Concept
 An operating system executes a variety of programs:
 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
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.2 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 3.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process in Memory

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Diagram of Process State

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.6 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 3.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 CPU Switch From Process to Process

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Process Scheduling

 Maximize CPU use, quickly switch processes onto

CPU for 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, 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 3.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Ready Queue And Various I/O Device Queues

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Representation of Process Scheduling

 Queueing diagram represents queues, resources,

flows

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.11 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) – 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 3.12 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 3.13 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 3.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.15 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 3.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne