Week 4

Chapter 3: Processes

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Outline
 Process Concept
 Process Scheduling
 Operations on Processes

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Objectives
 Identify the separate components of a process and illustrate
how they are represented and scheduled in an operating
system.
 Describe how processes are created and terminated in an
operating system, including developing programs using the
appropriate system calls that perform these operations.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Process Concept
 An operating system executes a variety of programs that run as a
process.
 Process – a program in execution; process execution must progress
in sequential fashion. No parallel execution of instructions of a single
process
 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 – 10th Edition 3.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Process Concept (Cont.)
 Program is passive entity stored on disk (executable file);
process is active
• Program becomes process when an executable file is
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 – 10th Edition 3.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Process in Memory

The memory layout of a process is typically divided into

multiple sections:

 Text section—the executable code

 Data section—global variables
 Heap section—memory that is dynamically allocated during
program run time
 Stack section—temporary data storage when invoking functions
(such as function parameters, return addresses, and local
variables)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Process in Memory

• Sizes of the text and data sections are

fixed, as their sizes do not change
during program run time.
• However, the stack and heap sections
can shrink and grow dynamically during
program execution.
• Stack contain function parameters, local
variables, and the return address.
• Heap will grow as memory is
dynamically allocated, and will shrink
when memory is returned to the system.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Memory Layout of a C Program
Layout of a C program in memory, highlighting how the different
sections of a process relate to an actual C program.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Contd . .

 The global data section is divided into different sections for

a) initialized data and

b) uninitialized data.

 A separate section is provided for the argc and argv parameters

passed to the main() function.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
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 – 10th Edition 3.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Diagram of Process State

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
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 – 10th Edition 3.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
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
 Explore in detail in Chapter 4

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
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 – 10th Edition 3.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Process Scheduling
 Process scheduler selects among available processes
for next execution on CPU core
 Goal -- Maximize CPU use, quickly switch processes onto
CPU core
 Maintains scheduling queues of processes
• Ready queue – set of all processes residing in main
memory, ready and waiting to execute
• Wait queues – set of processes waiting for an event
(i.e., I/O)
• Processes migrate among the various queues

Process Scheduling will be discussed in detail in next week

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018