CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Principles of Operating System

Course Code CIT11

Faculty of Computing and Information Technology

Computer Science Department
Spring, 2017/2018
These slides are based on lecture notes of the book’s author
& Portland University slides
& A. Frank - P. Weisberg slides
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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Processes

• This lecture will cover the following topics:

• Process Concept

• Process Scheduling

• Operations on Processes

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Objectives

• After completing this lecture, students will be able to:

• Demonstrate the concept of a process.

• Distinguish between process, program and thread.

• Clarify the various features of processes, several operations including

scheduling, creation, termination and communication.
• Implement process management operations using appropriate data
structures and API’s.

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Process Concept (1/4)

• An operating system executes a variety of programs:

• Batch system – jobs

• Time-shared systems – user programs or tasks

• Process
• Program in execution; process execution must progress in sequential fashion.

• Forms the basis of all computation.

• Note: Textbook uses the terms job and process almost interchangeably

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Process Concept (2/4)

• Process consist of multiple parts
• The program code, also called text section

• Data section containing global variables

• Stack containing temporary data

• Function parameters, return addresses, local variables

• Heap containing memory dynamically allocated during run time

• Current activity including program counter, processor registers

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Process in Memory

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Process Concept (3/4)

• Program
• Description of how to perform an activity
• Instructions and static data values
• Is passive entity stored on disk (executable file).
• Process
• A snapshot of a program in execution
• Memory (program instructions, static and dynamic data values)
• CPU state (registers, PC, SP, etc.)
• Operating system state (open files, accounting statistics, etc.)
• Process is active.

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Process Concept (4/4)

• 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

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

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

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Diagram of Process State

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Process Control Block (PCB)

• Information associated with each
process (also called task control block):
• Process state
• Program counter
• CPU registers
• CPU scheduling information
• Memory-management information
Accounting information
• I/O status information

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

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

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

CPU Switch from Process to Process

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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

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

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 */

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

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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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Ready Queue and Various I/O Device Queues

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Representation of Process Scheduling

 Queuing diagram represents queues, resources, flows

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Schedulers
• 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

• 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

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

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

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Processes Hierarchies and Operations

• System must provide mechanisms for:
• Process creation,
• Process termination, … etc.

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

How do processes get created?

• Principal events that cause process creation
• System initialization
• Initiation of a batch job
• User request to create a new process
• Execution of a process creation system call from another process

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

Process Creation
• Parent creates a child process,
• Special system calls for communicating with and waiting for child processes
• Each process is assigned a unique identifying number or process ID (PID)
• Child processes can create their own child processes
• Forms a hierarchy
• UNIX calls this a "process group"

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A Tree of Processes in Linux

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Process Creation (Cont.)

• Resource sharing options
• Execution options
• Address space
• 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

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 CIT11: Principles of Operating System

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.
• 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.
• If process terminate, no parent waiting (did not invoke wait()) process is a zombie
• If parent terminated without invoking wait , process is an orphan
• kill(), signal() system calls in UNIX allow a process to be terminated or have specific
signals sent to it.

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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)

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Communications Models
• Two models of IPC
• Shared memory
• Message passing
(a) Message passing. (b) shared memory.

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Summary
• Process is a program in execution, which forms the basis of all computation.
• Process may consist of multiple light-weight processes named threads.
• Each process compound of set of components and can be found in different states
such as ready, wait or running.
• Important issues or features such as scheduling, creation, deletion and
communication were discussed.

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Assignment
• Answer and submit questions in assignment5 that was attached with this lecture on
CLMS.
• Note : The due date for this assignment is two week from the time of taking the
lecture.

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Thanks

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