Module-II (Part-I):

Process Management

by:
Dr. Soumya Priyadarsini Panda
Assistant Professor
Dept. of CSE
Silicon Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar
 Contents

 Process Concept

 Process Scheduling

 Operations on Processes

 Inter Process Communication (IPC)

 Process Concept
 A process is a program in execution.

 An operating system executes a variety of programs:

 Batch system – jobs
 Time-shared systems – user programs or tasks

 Process execution must progress in sequential manner

 A process includes:
 program counter
 stack
 data section
 The Process
 A process has 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

Structure of a Process in Memory
 Difference between Program and
Process
 Program is passive entity, 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

 Each of these is a separate process
 Process States

 A process is a program in execution.

 When a process executes it changes its state.

Process States
 Process States
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
 Process Control Block (PCB)

 Each Process is represented in the OS by a Process Control

Block(PCB).

 Also called as task control block.

 It contains various information associated with a specific process

PCB Cont…
 PCB Cont…
Information associated with each process:
Process state:
 The state may be new, ready, running, waiting, etc

Program counter:
 Indicates the address of the next instruction to be executed for this
process.

CPU registers:
 Contents of all process-centric registers
 PCB Cont…
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
CPU Switch from Process to Process
 Process Scheduling
 Process scheduling refers to the mechanism that provides the order
in which the process is to be executed.

 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, Ready

queue, Device queue

 Processes migrate among the various queues

 Scheduling Queues
Job Queue:
 As processes enters to the System, they are stored into a job queue
which consist of all processes in the system

Ready Queue:
 The processes that are residing in main memory and are ready and
waiting to execute in CPU are kept in the ready queue

Device Queue:
 The list of processes waiting for a particular I/O device are kept in
device queue.
 Representation of Process Scheduling

 Queueing diagram represents queues, resources, flows

 Schedulers
 A process moves in between various scheduling queues through out its
lifetime.

 The selection process is carried out by the appropriate schedulers.

Types of Schedulers:
 Long term schedulers (Job schedulers)
 Short term schedulers (CPU schedulers)
Long Term Schedulers (Job Schedulers)

 Selects which processes should be brought into the ready queue.

 Long-term scheduler is invoked less frequently (seconds, minutes)

 The long-term scheduler controls the degree of multiprogramming.

 The long-term scheduler must make a careful selection of processes

 Cont…
 Processes can be described as:

I/O-bound process:
 spends more time doing I/O than computations
 short CPU bursts

CPU-bound process
 spends more time doing computations
 very long CPU bursts

 Long-term scheduler must select a mix of I/O-bound and CPU-

bound processes.
Short Term Schedulers (CPU Schedulers)

 Selects which process should be executed next and allocates CPU

 Sometimes the only scheduler in a system

 Short-term scheduler is invoked frequently (in some milliseconds)

Long Term Vs. Short-term Schedulers
 Addition of Medium Term Schedulers
 Some operating systems, such as time sharing systems, may introduced
an additional intermediate level of scheduling-
 medium term schedulers

 The idea behind the medium term scheduler is that-

 Sometimes it can be advantageous to swapped out the process from
memory to reduce the degree of multi programming.
 The swapped out process can be swapped in later to finish its
execution.

 This scheme is called swapping and is performed by the medium term

scheduler.
Cont…
 Difference between Schedulers
Long-Term Short-Term Medium-Term
Long term is also known as Short term is also known as Medium-term is also called
a job scheduler CPU scheduler swapping scheduler.

It is either absent or minimal It is insignificant in the This scheduler is an element

in a time-sharing system. time-sharing order. of Time-sharing systems.

Speed is the fastest

Speed is less compared to
compared to the short-term It offers medium speed.
the short term scheduler.
and medium-term scheduler.
Allow you to select It only selects processes that
It helps you to send process
processes from the loads and is in a ready state of the
back to memory.
pool back into the memory execution.
Reduce the level of
Offers full control Offers less control
multiprogramming.
 Context Switching

 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

 Cont…

 Context-switch time is overhead; the system does no useful work

while switching

 The more complex the OS and the PCB -> longer the context switch

 Time dependent on hardware support

 Operations on Process

 Processes in most systems can execute concurrently, and they may

be created and deleted dynamically

 Process Creation

 Process Termination
 Process Creation
 Parent process create children processes, which, in turn may create
other processes, forming a tree of processes.
 A process is 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
 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
 Process Termination

 A process terminates when it finishes executing its final statement

and asks the operating system to delete it by using the exit() system
call.

 All the resources of the process: physical and virtual memory, open
files, and I/O buffers, etc are deallocated by the operating system.
 Cont…
 Parent may terminate the execution of children processes using the
abort() system call-

 Reasons:
 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

 A parent process may wait for the termination of a child process by

using the wait() system call.
 Cont…
 Some operating systems do not allow child to exists if its parent has
terminated.

 If a process terminates (normally or abnormally), then all its children

must also be terminated. This phenomenon is referred to as cascading
termination.

 Process that has terminated, but whose parent has not yet called
wait(), is known as a zombie process.

 If a parent did not invoke wait() and terminated, leaving its child
processes, the child process is known as orphan process.
 Inter Process Communication (IPC)

 Processes executing concurrently in the operating system may be:

 Independent Processes

 Cooperating processes
 Cont…
Independent Process:
 If the process cannot affect or be affected by the other processes
executing in the system.
 Any process that does not share data with any other process is
independent.

Cooperating process:
 If the process can affect or be affected by the other processes executing
in the system.
 Any process that shares data with other processes is a cooperating
process
 Cont…
Reasons for process cooperation:

 Information sharing

 Computation speedup

 Modularity

 Convenience
 Cont…
 Cooperating processes need Inter Process Communication (IPC)

Models of IPC:

 Shared memory

 Message passing
 Shared Memory

 In the shared-memory model, a region of memory is shared by

cooperating processes.

 Processes can exchange information by reading and writing data to

the shared region.

 Shared memory can be faster than message passing, since message-

passing systems are typically implemented using system calls.
Message Passing Vs. Shared Memory

Message passing Shared Memory

 Message Passing

 In the message-passing model, communication takes place by means

of messages exchanged between the cooperating processes

 Message passing is useful for exchanging smaller amounts of data,

because no conflicts need be avoided.

 Message passing is also easier to implement in a distributed system

than shared memory
 Cont…
 IPC facility provides two operations for message passing:
 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

 Major issues is to provide mechanism that will allow the user

processes to synchronize their actions when they access shared
memory.
 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
 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
 Synchronization
 Message passing may be either blocking or non-blocking

 Blocking is considered synchronous

 Blocking send has the sender block until the message is received
 Blocking receive has the receiver block until a message is
available

 Non-blocking is considered asynchronous

 Non-blocking send has the sender send the message and continue
 Non-blocking receive has the receiver receive a valid message or
null
 Buffering
 Messages exchanged by communicating processes reside in a
temporary queue implemented in three ways:

Zero capacity:
 No messages are queued on a link.
 Sender must wait for receiver

Bounded capacity:
 Finite length of n messages
 Sender must wait if link full

Unbounded capacity:
 Infinite length
 Sender never waits