Chapter 3: Processes

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Chapter 3: Processes
Process Concept
Process Scheduling
Operations on Processes
Interprocess Communication
Examples of IPC Systems
Communication in Client-Server Systems

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Objectives
To introduce the notion of a process -- a program in
execution, which forms the basis of all computation
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 ©2013
 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 3.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 ©2013
 Process in Memory

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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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Diagram of Process State

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Control Block (PCB)
A data structure that holds 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 ©2013
 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 3.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 CPU Switch From Process to Process

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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,
each device has its own queue
Processes migrate among the various queues
Stored as a linked list

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Representation of Process Scheduling

Queueing diagram represents queues, resources, flows

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Schedulers
Scheduler selects processes from ques and (dispatcher) assign them
CPU
Short-term scheduler (or CPU scheduler) – selects which process should
be executed next and allocates CPU, among the processes which are ready
to execute (in ready queue)
Sometimes the only scheduler in a system
Short-term scheduler is invoked frequently (milliseconds)  (must be
fast)
Invokes dispatcher
Dispatcher assigns the CPU to the process selected by short term
scheduler
Long-term scheduler (or job scheduler) – selects which processes should
be brought/loaded into the main memory and put in ready queue
Long-term scheduler is invoked infrequently (seconds, minutes)  (may be
slow)
The long-term scheduler controls the degree of multiprogramming
 Decides: When and How many processes in main memory

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Schedulers
Processes can be described as either:
I/O-bound process – spends more time doing I/O than computations,
many short CPU bursts. Example: Word processor, payroll printing
CPU-bound process – spends more time doing computations; few very
long CPU bursts. Example: network control etc, scientific application
Long-term scheduler strives for good process mix

Medium Term scheduler: Swapper

A process is temporarily stored in disk

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Addition of Medium Term Scheduling
Medium-term scheduler can be added if degree of multi-
programming is required to decrease or memory is needs to be
freed
Remove process from memory, store on disk, bring back in
from disk to continue execution: swapping
Swap space

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Context Switch
Take CPU from a currently running process and assign it
to another process

What do we need to make sure when CPU is assigned

again to a process?

What is context: register values, PC value, … all info from

PCB is loaded to CPU

Done by Dispatcher NOT Scheduler

Context switch time may vary based on process

No useful work done: Context switch overhead

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 Operations on Processes

System must provide mechanisms for:

process creation,
process termination,
and so on as detailed next

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 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 ©2013
 A Tree of Processes in Linux

init
pid = 1

login kthreadd sshd

pid = 8415 pid = 2 pid = 3028

bash khelper pdflush sshd

pid = 8416 pid = 6 pid = 200 pid = 3610

emacs tcsch
ps
pid = 9204 pid = 4005
pid = 9298

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Creation (Cont.)
Address space (if parent and child address space has any relation)
Child duplicate of parent (exact memory image) UNIX/LINUX
Child has a program loaded into it (can be independently
executable program)
UNIX examples: System Calls
fork() system call creates new process
exec() system call used after a fork() to replace the
process’ memory space with a new program.
 Process overwrites itself with another program

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 C Program Forking Separate Process

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 UNIX Example
When system boots, first user level process created is ‘init’
After that fork and exec created other processes

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Fork () return value
Return value of fork()
Negative Value: creation of a child process was unsuccessful.
Zero: Returned to the newly created child process.
Positive value: Returned to parent or caller. The value contains process ID
of newly created child process.
pid = fork();
if (pid == -1){
pid == -1 means error occured
printf("can't fork, error occured\n");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
else if (pid == 0){
pid == 0 means child process created
}

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Fork () Example
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main()
{
fork();
printf("Hello world!\n");
return 0;
}

Output:
Hello world
Hello world
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Fork () Example
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
int main()
{
fork();
fork();
fork();
printf("hello\n");
return 0;
}

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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);

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Termination

Zombie Process Vs Orphan Process

If no parent waiting (did not invoke wait()) process is a zombie
Example: The child finishes its execution using exit() system call
while the parent sleeps for 50 seconds, hence doesn’t call wait()

If parent terminated without invoking wait , process is an orphan

Example: Parent finishes execution and exits while the child process
is still executing and is called an orphan process now

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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
Modularity: Efficiency - dividing complicated tasks into smaller
subtasks. These subtasks can completed by different cooperating
processes.
Information sharing: Sharing of information between multiple
processes - may include access to the same files- processes can
access the files in parallel to each other.
Computation speed-up: Subtasks of a single task can be
performed parallelly using cooperating processes
Convenience There are many tasks that a user needs to do such
as compiling, printing, editing etc. It is convenient if these tasks
can be managed by cooperating processes

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Methods of Cooperation
Cooperating processes can coordinate with each other using shared
data or messages. Details about these are given as follows:
1. Sharing (shared data):
The cooperating processes can cooperate with each other using
shared data such as memory, variables, files, databases etc.
Critical section is used to provide data integrity and writing is
mutually exclusive to prevent inconsistent data.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Methods of Cooperation
2. Message Passing:
The cooperating processes can cooperate with each other using
messages. This may lead to deadlock if each process is waiting for a
message from the other to perform a operation. Starvation is also
possible if a process never receives a message.
A diagram that demonstrates cooperation by communication is given
as follows:

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Producer-Consumer Problem
To illustrate the concept of cooperating processes, let’s
consider the producer–consumer problem,
producer process produces information that is consumed by
a consumer process
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.
bounded-buffer assumes that there is a fixed buffer
size
 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 ©2013
 Bounded-Buffer – Shared-Memory Solution

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

item buffer[BUFFER_SIZE];
int in = 0;
int out = 0;

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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Bounded-Buffer – Producer

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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 ©2013
 Interprocess Communication

Cooperating processes need inter-process communication (IPC)

Two models of IPC
Shared memory
Message passing

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 Communications Models
(a) Message passing. (b) shared memory.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.40 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Interprocess Communication – Shared Memory

An area of memory shared among the processes that wish

to communicate
The communication is under the control of the users
processes not the operating system.
Major issues is to provide mechanism that will allow the
user processes to synchronize their actions when they
access shared memory.
Synchronization is discussed in great details in Chapter 5.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.41 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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.

IPC facility provides two operations:

send(message)
receive(message)

The message size is either fixed or variable

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.42 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Message Passing (Cont.)

If processes P and Q want to communicate, they must send messages

to and receive messages from each other: a communication link
must exist between them. This link can be implemented in a variety of
ways
Implementation issues:
How are links established?
Can a link be associated with more than two processes?
How many links can there 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 3.43 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Message Passing (Cont.)

Implementation of communication link

Physical:
 Shared memory
 Hardware bus
 Network
Logical:
 Direct or indirect communication
 Synchronous or asynchronous communication
 Automatic or explicit buffering

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.44 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Direct Communication

Processes must explicitly name the recipient or sender of the

communication :
send (P, message) – send a message to process P
receive(Q, message) – receive a message from process Q
Properties of communication link
Links are established automatically
A link is associated with exactly one pair of communicating
processes
Between each pair there exists exactly one link
The link may be unidirectional, but is usually bi-directional

This scheme exhibits symmetry in addressing; that is, both the

sender process and the receiver process must name the other to
communicate.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.45 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Indirect Communication

Messages are directed and received from mailboxes (also referred

to as ports)
Each mailbox has a unique id
Processes can communicate only if they share a mailbox
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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.46 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.47 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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.
Sender is notified who the receiver was.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.48 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.49 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Buffering

Whether communication is direct or indirect, messages

exchanged by communicating processes reside in a temporary
queue.
implemented in one of three ways
1. Zero capacity – no messages are queued on a link.
Sender must wait for receiver (rendezvous)
 the link cannot have any messages waiting in it. In this
case, the sender must block until the recipient receives
the message.
2. Bounded capacity – finite length of n messages
If the link is full, the sender must block until space is
available in the queue.
3. Unbounded capacity – infinite length
Sender never waits

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.50 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 End of Chapter 3

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013