Chapter 3: Processes

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Chapter 3 Processes

• Overview
• Process Concept
• Process Scheduling
• Operations on 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
• Textbook uses the terms job and process almost
  interchangeably
• Process a program in execution process
  execution must progress in sequential fashion
• A process includes
• program counter, representing the current
  activity
• Stack, containing temporary data such as method
  parameters, return addresses, and local variables
• data section, which contains the global variables
• heap, memory that is dynamically allocated during
  runtime.

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Process in Memory
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Process State

• As a process executes, it changes its state. A
  process can be in one of the following states.
• new The process is being created
• running executing Instructions
• waiting waiting for some event to occur
• ready 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)

• The process control block (PCB), a data structure
  maintained by the OS for each process, contains
  the following Information associated with each
  process
• Process state (new, ready, running, )
• Program counter, which indicates the next
  instruction to be executed
• CPU registers information saved when an interrupt
  occurs
• CPU scheduling information such as priority,
  pointers to scheduling queues, etc
• Memory-management information includes base limit
  addresses, page tables, etc.
• Accounting information amount of CPU time used
• I/O status information list of I/O devices
  allocated, list of open files, etc.

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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
• Processes migrate among 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. It controls the degree of
  multiprogramming.
• Should select a good mixture of I/O bound and CPU
  bound processes to increase throughput
• Some OSs like UNIX do not have a long-term
  scheduler. They put all processes in memory
• Short-term scheduler (or CPU scheduler) selects
  which process should be executed next and
  allocates CPU.
• Medium term scheduler Some OSs have this
  scheduler which removes processes from memory and
  swaps to disk to reduce the degree of
  multiprogramming to increase throughput

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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.
• Context switch time dependent on hardware
  support. For example, if register contents do not
  have to be saved because of the availability of
  large number of registers, then context switch
  time will be low.

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Process Creation

• Parent process creates children processes, which,
  in turn create other processes, forming a tree of
  processes
• Resource sharing OSs use different approaches
• Parent and children share all resources
• Children share subset of parents resources
• Parent and child share no resources
• Execution
• Parent and children execute concurrently
• Parent can wait/not wait until children terminate

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Process Creation (Cont.)

• Address space
• Child is duplicate of parent.
• Child has a program loaded into it.
• UNIX/Linux examples
• fork system call creates a new process whose
  address space is identical to its parent process.
• fork returns 0 in child and the process id of
  child in parent it returns -1 if it fails.
• exec system call is used after a fork to replace
  the new process memory space with a new program.
  Variations of exec system call are execlp,
  execvp,
• Important exec does not return unless it fails.
• wait system call is used by the parent to wait
  for the completion of child

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Process Creation
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A Sample Program using fork()

• int main()
• pid_t pid
• / fork another process /
• pid fork()
• if (pid
• fprintf(stderr, "Fork Failed")
• exit(-1)
• else if (pid 0) / child process /
• execlp("ls", "ls", NULL)
• else / parent process /
• / parent will wait for the child to complete
  /
• wait (NULL)
• printf ("Child Completed")
• exit(0)

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A tree of processes on a typical Solaris system
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Process Termination

• Process executes last statement and asks the
  operating system to delete 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) if
• Child has exceeded allocated resources
• Task assigned to child is no longer required
• If parent is exiting
• Some operating systems do not allow its children
  to continue if their parent terminates
• All children are terminated - cascading
  termination

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Interprocess Communication (IPC)

• Mechanism for processes to communicate and
  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. hardware bus)
• logical (e.g., shared memory, sockets)

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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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Communications Models
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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
• Blocking send requires the sender block until the
  message is received
• Blocking receive requires the receiver block
  until a message is available
• Non-blocking is considered asynchronous
• Non-blocking send requires the sender send the
  message and continue
• Non-blocking receive requires the receiver
  receive a valid message or null

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Buffering

• Queue of messages attached to the link
  implemented in one of three ways
• 1. Zero capacity 0 messagesSender must wait
  for receiver (rendezvous)
• 2. Bounded capacity finite length of n
  messagesSender must wait if link full
• 3. Unbounded capacity infinite length Sender
  never waits (not possible to implement)

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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 number
• The socket 161.25.19.81625 refers to port 1625
  on host with IP address 161.25.19.8
• Communication takes place 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 executes
  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.