Chapter 2: Process and process

Management
• Process Concept
• Process Scheduling
• Operations on Processes
• Cooperating Processes
• Interprocess Communication
• Communication in Client-Server
Systems

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 Process Concept
• An operating system executes a variety of programs:
– Batch system – jobs
– Time-shared systems – user programs or tasks
• The terms job and process almost used interchangeably.
• Process – a program in execution; process execution
must progress in sequential fashion.
• A process includes:
– program counter
– stack
– data section

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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.

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Diagram of Process State

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Process Control Block (PCB)
Information associated with each process.
• Process state
• Program counter
• CPU registers
• CPU scheduling information
• Memory-management information
• Accounting information
• I/O status information

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Process Control Block (PCB)

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CPU Switch From Process to Process

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 Process Scheduling Queues
• 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.
• Process migration between the various queues.

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Ready Queue And Various I/O Device Queues

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Representation of Process Scheduling

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 Schedulers
• Long-term scheduler (or job scheduler) – selects which
processes should be brought into the ready queue.
• Short-term scheduler (or CPU scheduler) – selects which
process should be executed next and allocates CPU.

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Addition of Medium Term Scheduling

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 Schedulers (Cont.)
• Short-term scheduler is invoked very frequently
(milliseconds)  (must be fast).
• Long-term scheduler is invoked very 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.

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 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.
• Context-switch time is overhead; the system does
no useful work while switching.
• Time dependent on hardware support.

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 Process Creation
• Parent process create children processes, which,
in turn create other processes, forming a tree of
processes.
• Resource sharing
– Parent and children share all resources.
– Children share subset of parent’s resources.
– Parent and child share no resources.
• Execution
– Parent and children execute concurrently.
– Parent waits until children terminate.
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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 space with a new program.

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Processes Tree on a UNIX System

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 Process Termination
• Process executes last statement and asks the operating
system to decide it (exit).
– Output data from child to parent (via wait).
– Process’ resources are deallocated by operating system.
• Parent may terminate execution of children processes
(abort).
– Child has exceeded allocated resources.
– Task assigned to child is no longer required.
– Parent is exiting.
• Operating system does not allow child to continue if its parent
terminates.
• Cascading termination.

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 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

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 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.

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 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

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Bounded-Buffer – Producer Process

item nextProduced;

while (1) {
while (((in + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE) == out)
; /* do nothing */
buffer[in] = nextProduced;
in = (in + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE;
}
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Bounded-Buffer – Consumer Process

item nextConsumed;

while (1) {
while (in == out)
; /* do nothing */
nextConsumed = buffer[out];
out = (out + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE;
}

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 Interprocess Communication (IPC)
• 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)

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 Implementation Questions
• 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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 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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 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.

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 Indirect Communication
• Operations
– create a new mailbox
– 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

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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.

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 Synchronization
• Message passing may be either blocking or
non-blocking.
• Blocking is considered synchronous
• Non-blocking is considered asynchronous
• send and receive primitives may be either
blocking or non-blocking.

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 Buffering
• Queue of messages attached to the link;
implemented in one of three ways.
1.Zero capacity – 0 messages
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.

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 Client-Server Communication
• Sockets
• Remote Procedure Calls
• Remote Method Invocation (Java)

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 Sockets
• A socket is defined as an endpoint for
communication.
• Concatenation of IP address and port
• The socket 161.25.19.8:1625 refers to port
1625 on host 161.25.19.8
• Communication consists between a pair of
sockets.

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Socket Communication

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 Remote Procedure Calls
• Remote procedure call (RPC) abstracts procedure
calls between processes on networked systems.
• 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 peforms
the procedure on the server.
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Execution of RPC

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 Remote Method Invocation
• Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is a Java
mechanism similar to RPCs.
• RMI allows a Java program on one machine to
invoke a method on a remote object.

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Marshalling Parameters

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