CITS2002 Systems Programming  
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Processes

The fundamental activity of an operating system is the creation, management, and termination of processes.

What is a process? Naively:

  • a program under execution,
  • the "animated" existence of a program,
  • an identifiable entity executed on a processor by the operating system.

More particularly, we consider how the operating system itself views a process:

  • as an executable instance of a program,
  • as the associated data operated upon by the program (variables, temporary results, external (file) storage, ...), and
  • as the program's execution context.

It is a clear requirement of modern operating systems that they enable many processes to execute efficiently, by maximising their use of the processor, by supporting inter-process communication, and by maintaining reasonable response time.

This is an ongoing challenge: as hardware improves, it is "consumed" by larger, "hungrier" pieces of interlinked software.

 


CITS2002 Systems Programming, Lecture 7, p1, 14th August 2023.