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

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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.10 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
 See next chapter

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.12 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
 Processes migrate among the various queues

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Ready Queue And Various I/O Device Queues

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Representation of Process Scheduling

 Queueing diagram represents queues, resources, flows

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.16 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 – 9th Edition 3.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.18 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 3.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Operations on Processes

 System must provide mechanisms for:

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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

i ni t
pi d = 1

l ogi n kt hr e add s s hd
pi d = 8415 pi d = 2 pi d = 3028

bas h khe l pe r pdf l us h s s hd

pi d = 8416 pi d = 6 pi d = 200 pi d = 3610

e mac s t cs ch
ps
pi d = 9204 pi d = 4005
pi d = 9298

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 ©2013
 C Program Forking Separate Process

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Creating a Separate Process via Windows API

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.25 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 3.26 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);
 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 ©2013
 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 ©2013
 Interprocess Communication
 Processes within a system may be independent or cooperating
 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 – 9th Edition 3.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Communications Models
(a) Message passing. (b) shared memory.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.30 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
 Information sharing
 Computation speed-up
 Modularity
 Convenience

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Producer-Consumer Problem
 Paradigm for cooperating processes, producer process
produces information that is consumed by a consumer
process
 unbounded-buffer places no practical limit on the size
of the buffer
 bounded-buffer assumes that there is a fixed buffer
size

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.32 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 3.33 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)
; /* do nothing */
buffer[in] = next_produced;
in = (in + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE;
}

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.34 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 3.35 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 3.36 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)
 receive(message)

 The message size is either fixed or variable

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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.38 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Message Passing (Cont.)

 Implementation of communication link

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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.39 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.40 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 3.41 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 3.42 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 3.43 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 3.44 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.45 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Buffering

 Queue of messages attached to the link.

 implemented in one of 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 3.46 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.47 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 IPC POSIX Producer

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.48 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 IPC POSIX Consumer

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.49 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.50 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.51 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Local Procedure Calls in Windows

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.52 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Communications in Client-Server Systems

 Sockets
 Remote Procedure Calls
 Pipes
 Remote Method Invocation (Java)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.53 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Sockets
 A socket is defined as an endpoint for communication

 Concatenation of IP address and port – a number included at

start of message packet to differentiate network services on a
host

 The socket 161.25.19.8:1625 refers to port 1625 on host

161.25.19.8

 Communication consists between a pair of sockets

 All ports below 1024 are well known, used for standard
services

 Special IP address 127.0.0.1 (loopback) to refer to system on

which process is running

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.54 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Socket Communication

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.55 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.56 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Remote Procedure Calls
 Remote procedure call (RPC) abstracts procedure calls
between processes on networked systems
 Again uses ports for service differentiation
 Stubs – client-side proxy for the actual procedure on the
server
 The client-side stub locates the server and marshalls the
parameters
 The server-side stub receives this message, unpacks the
marshalled parameters, and performs the procedure on the
server
 On Windows, stub code compile from specification written in
Microsoft Interface Definition Language (MIDL)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.57 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Remote Procedure Calls (Cont.)
 Data representation handled via External Data
Representation (XDL) format to account for different
architectures
 Big-endian and little-endian
 Remote communication has more failure scenarios than local
 Messages can be delivered exactly once rather than at
most once
 OS typically provides a rendezvous (or matchmaker) service
to connect client and server

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.58 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Execution of RPC

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.59 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 that it created.
 Named pipes – can be accessed without a parent-child
relationship.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.60 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 3.61 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.62 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 End of Chapter 3

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