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 8, p1, 14th August 2024.
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CITS2002