Process Management

Flashcards covering key concepts in process management, including definitions, states, scheduling algorithms, and system calls.

What is a process?

The execution of a program that performs the actions specified in that program.

Process states

Conditions of the process at a specific instant of time, defining its current position.

What are the five states of a process?

New, Ready, Running, Waiting, Halt.

What happens in the new state?

A new process is created when a specific program is called from secondary memory to primary memory.

What is context switching?

The process of saving the context of one process and loading the context of another process.

What is a context switch?

Saving and restoring the state of a CPU so that multiple processes can share a single CPU resource.

What is a mode switch?

Refers to the transition of the CPU from one privilege level to another.

What is the purpose of process management?

To manage creation, scheduling, termination of processes and handling deadlocks.

What are the steps in process creation?

Initialization, allocation of Process ID (PID), memory allocation, creation of Process Control Block (PCB), scheduling, execution.

What does the fork() system call do?

It duplicates the current process to create a new child process in Unix-like operating systems.

What occurs during process termination?

Resources, memory, and I/O devices are deallocated after the exit system call is made.

What is multithreading?

The ability of a program to execute multiple threads concurrently within a single process.

What is the role of a long-term scheduler?

Selects processes from the queue and puts them in memory for execution.

Define arrival time in process scheduling.

The time at which the process arrives in the ready queue.

What is the First Come First Serve (FCFS) scheduling algorithm?

A non-preemptive scheduling algorithm where processes are attended to in the order they arrive.

What is the Shortest Job First (SJF) scheduling algorithm?

A non-preemptive scheduling algorithm that selects the process with the smallest execution time.

Define turn around time (TaT) in process scheduling.

The time difference between the completion time and arrival time of a process.

What does waiting time (WT) represent?

The time difference between turn around time and burst time.