Chapter 3: Processes

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

 Chapter 3: Processes
● Process Concept
● Process Scheduling
● Operations on Processes
● Interprocess Communication

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Concept

● Process – a program in execution; process execution must

progress in sequential fashion
● Process Multiple parts
● text section: The program code.
● Current activity Section: including program counter,
processor registers
● Stack section: containing temporary data
4 Function parameters, return addresses, local
variables
● Data section: containing global variables
● Heap section: containing memory dynamically
allocated during run time

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.3 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
● One program can be several processes
● Consider multiple users executing the same program

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 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

Diagram of Process State

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 – 9 th Edition 3.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 CPU Switch From Process to Process

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 Question

● What to we mean by save and reload the

process state in the case of context
switch?

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.9 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
● Processes migrate among the various queues

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 Ready Queue And Various I/O Device Queues

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 Representation of Process Scheduling

● Queueing diagram represents queues, resources, flows

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 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 – 9 th Edition 3.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 – 9 th Edition 3.14 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 – 9 th Edition 3.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Operations on Processes

● System must provide mechanisms for:

● process creation.
● process execution.
● process termination.

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Creation & Exec.
● 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
● Address space
● Child duplicate of parent
● Child has a program loaded into it

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Creation & exec. (Cont.)
● UNIX examples
● fork() creates new process
● exec() used after a fork() to execute the process code.

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 ● The fork() command makes a complete copy of the
running process and the only way to differentiate the
two is by looking at the returned value
● fork() returns the process identifier (pid) of the child process in
the parent
● fork() returns 0 in the child.

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 #include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main()
{
int pid;
/* fork another process */
pid = fork(); C Program
if (pid < 0) { /* error occurred */
fprintf(stderr, "Fork Failed"); Forking
}
exit(-1);
Separate
else if (pid == 0) { /* child process */ Process
execlp("/bin/ls", "ls", NULL);
}
else { /* parent process */
/* parent will wait for the child to complete */
wait (NULL);
printf ("Child Complete");
exit(0);
}
return 0;
}
Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 A tree of processes on a typical Solaris

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 Question

● Why do we need fork to create new

processes?

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 Process Termination

● Process executes last statement and then asks the operating

system to delete it using the exit().
● Returns status data from child to parent .
● Process’ resources are deallocated by operating system
● Parent may terminate the execution of children processes using
the abort(). 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 – 9 th Edition 3.23 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.

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 ● How processes communicate?

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 Interprocess Communication

● Processes within a system may be independent or cooperating.

● Independent process cannot affect or be affected by the
execution of another process
● Cooperating process can affect or be affected by other processes,
including sharing data
● Reasons for cooperating processes:
● Information sharing
● Computation speedup
● Modularity
● Convenience
● Cooperating processes need interprocess communication (IPC)
● Two models of IPC
● Shared memory
● Message passing

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Communications Models

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

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 Question

● What are the strengths and weaknesses

of the two communication models?

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Interprocess Communication – Shared Memory

● 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.

● Interprocess Communication – Message Passing

● IPC facility provides two operations:
4 send(message)
4 receive(message)
● If processes P and Q wish to communicate, they need to:
4 Establish a communication link between them
4 Exchange messages via send/receive

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 3.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Interprocess Communication – Message Passing

● Mechanism for processes to communicate and to synchronize their

actions
● Message system – processes communicate with each other
without resorting to shared variables
● IPC facility provides two operations:
● send(message) – message size fixed or variable
● receive(message)
● If P and Q wish to communicate, they need to:
● establish a communication link between them
● exchange messages via send/receive
● Implementation of communication link
● physical (e.g., shared memory, hardware bus)
● logical (e.g., logical properties)

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