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CSC351-Operating System
Week-3 Lecture-5
Semester 5
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Process concept
►Process States
Preamble ►Queues
(Past lesson ►Schedulers
brief)

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Operations on Processes

 System must provide mechanisms for:

 Process creation
 Process Preemption
 Process Blocking
 Process termination

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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

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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

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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
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Process Preemption

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Process Blocking

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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

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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 (a zombie
process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution but
still has an entry in the process table)
 If parent terminated without invoking wait , process is an orphan

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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
 Plug-in process for each type of plug-in

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Inter process Communication

 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
 Any process that share data with other processes is a cooperating
process.

 Reasons for providing an environment for process cooperation

 Information sharing
 Computation speed-up
 Modularity
 Convenience

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Inter process
Communication(Cont…)

 Information sharing:
 Since several users may be interested in the same piece of information (for
instance, a shared file) we must provide an environment to allow concurrent users
to access these types of resources.

 Computation speed up:

 If we want a particular task to run faster, we must break it into subtasks each of
which will be running in parallel with the others. Such a speedup can be obtained
only if the computer has multiple processing elements (such as CPU’s or I/O
channels).

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Inter process
Communication(Cont…)

 Modularity:
We may want to construct the system in a modular fashion, dividing the system
functions into separate processes or threads.
 Convenience:
Even an individual user may have many tasks on which to work at one time. For
instance, a user may be editing, printing, and compiling in parallel.

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Models for Inter process
Communication

 Cooperating processes require an inter process communication (IPC)

mechanism that will allow them to exchange data and information.
 There are Two Fundamental models of IPC
 Shared memory
 Message passing

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Shared Memory

 An area of memory shared among the processes that wish to

communicate
 Processes can then exchange information by reading and writing
data to the shared region.
 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 ahead.

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Message Passing

 In this model, communication takes place by means of messages

exchange between the cooperating processes, Message system in
which processes communicate with each other without resorting to
shared variables 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

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Communications Models

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

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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?
 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?
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Message Passing (Cont.)

 Implementation of communication link

 Physical:
 Shared memory
 Hardware bus
 Network
 Logically implementing a link
 Direct or indirect communication
 Synchronous or asynchronous communication
 Automatic or explicit buffering

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Message Passing (Cont.)

 Issues regarding Logically implementing a link

 Direct or indirect communication [Naming issue]
 Synchronous or asynchronous communication
 Automatic or explicit buffering

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 Naming 22

Direct Communication

 Processes must name each other explicitly:

 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

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 Property of direct Communication23
for message passing

 This Scheme exhibits symmetry in addressing;

That is both the sender process and the receiver process must name the other to
communicate
 Another variant of Direct Communication
Here, 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;
the variable is set to the name of the process with which communication has
taken place (This scheme employs asymmetry in addressing)
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Disadvantage of both these
Schemes

 The disadvantage in both of these schemes (symmetric and

asymmetric) is the limited modularity of the resulting process
definitions.
 Changing the identifier of a process may necessitate examining all
other process definitions.

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Indirect Communication

The messages are sent to and received from mailboxes, or ports.

A mailbox can be viewed abstractly as an object into which messages can
be placed by processes and from which messages can be removed.
 Each mailbox has a unique identification.
 Processes can communicate only if they share a mailbox
 Primitives are defined as:
send(A, message) – send a message to mailbox A
receive(A, message) – receive a message from mailbox A

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Indirect Communication

 Properties of communication link

 Link established only if processes share a common mailbox
 A link may be associated with more than two processes
 Each pair of processes may share several communication links
 Link may be unidirectional or bi-directional
Operations
 create a new mailbox (port)
 send and receive messages through mailbox
 destroy a mailbox

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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.

A mailbox may be owned either by a process or by the operating system.

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Synchronization

 Communication between processes takes place through calls to send()

and receive() primitives. There are different design options for
implementing each primitive.
 Message passing may be either blocking or nonblocking also known as
synchronous and asynchronous.
 Blocking send. The sending process is blocked until the message is
received by the receiving process or by the mailbox.
 Nonblocking send. The sending process sends the message and resumes
operation.
 Blocking receive. The receiver blocks until a message is available.
 Nonblocking receive. The receiver retrieves either a valid message or a
null.

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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:
 Zero capacity. The queue has a maximum length of zero; thus, the link
cannot have any messages waiting in it. In this case, the sender must
block until the recipient receives the message.
 Bounded capacity. The queue has finite length n; thus, at most n
messages can reside in it. If the queue is not full when a new message
is sent, the message is placed in the queue (either the message is
copied or a pointer to the message is kept), and the sender can
continue execution without waiting. The link’s capacity is finite,
however. If the link is full, the sender must block until space is available
in the queue.
 Unbounded capacity. The queue’s length is potentially infinite; thus,
any number of messages can wait in it. The sender never blocks.
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Reference

 To cover this topics , different reference material has

been used for consultation.
 Operating systems concept by Abraham siberchatz
edition 9
 Tutorialspoint.com
 Google.com

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