Chapter 3: Part 1

Processes and threads

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Objectives
 To introduce the notion of a process -- a program in
execution, which forms the basis of all computation
 To describe the various features of processes, including
scheduling, creation and termination, and communication
 To explore interprocess communication using shared memory
and message passing
 To describe communication in client-server systems

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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
 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 – 9th Edition 3.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Concept (Cont.)
 Program (job) is passive entity stored on disk (executable file),
process is active
 Program (job) becomes process when executable file 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 – 9th Edition 3.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process in Memory

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 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 – 9th Edition 3.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Diagram of Process State

 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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
 The PCB is kept in a memory area that is protected
from the normal user access

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Scheduling

 Maximize CPU use, quickly switch processes onto CPU for time
sharing
 Process scheduler selects among available processes in
ready queue for next execution on CPU
 Maintains scheduling queues of processes
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Ready Queue And Various I/O Device Queues

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 Representation of Process Scheduling

 Queueing diagram represents queues, resources, flows

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Schedulers
 Short-term scheduler (or CPU scheduler) – selects from the ready queue
which process should be executed next and allocates CPU
 Sometimes the only scheduler in a system
 Short-term scheduler is invoked frequently (milliseconds)  (must be
fast)
 Long-term scheduler (or job scheduler) – selects (from the secondary
storage devices ) which jobs should be brought into the ready queue
 Long-term scheduler is invoked infrequently (seconds, minutes)  (may
be slow)
 The long-term scheduler controls the degree of multiprogramming

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Addition of Medium Term Scheduling
 Medium-term scheduler can be added if degree of multiple
programming needs to decrease
 Remove process from memory, store on disk, bring back in
from disk to continue execution: swapping

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 CPU Switch From Process to Process

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 Context Switch
 When CPU switches to another process,
 the system must save the state of the old process (interrupted
process) and
 load the saved state for the new process via a context switch
 Context of a process represented in the PCB
 Context-switch time is overhead; the system does no useful
work to user processes while switching
 The more complex the OS and the PCB  the longer the
context switch
 Time dependent on hardware support
 Some hardware provides multiple sets of registers per CPU
 multiple contexts loaded at once

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Operations on Processes

 System must provide mechanisms for:

 process creation,
 process termination,
 and so on as detailed next

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Creation
 Parent process create children processes, which, in turn
create other processes, forming a tree of processes
 Generally, process identified and managed via a process
identifier (pid)
 Resource sharing options
 Parent and children share all resources
 Children share subset of parent’s resources
 Parent and child share no resources
 Execution options
 Parent and children execute concurrently
 Parent waits until children terminate

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Creation (Cont.)
 Address space
 Child duplicate of parent
 Child has a program loaded into it
 UNIX examples
 fork() system call creates new process
 exec() system call used after a fork() to replace the
process’ memory space with a new program

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Process Termination

 There are two methods a process can terminate:

 1. Normal termination: A process finishes executing its final
statement. All the resources allocated to it are freed by the
operating system.
 2. Forced Termination: A parent process can terminate its child
process by invoking the appropriate system call. The parent can
terminate the child due to the following reasons:
 1. Child exceeds its usage of resources
 2. Task assigned to the child is no longer required
 3. Parent exits and OS does not allow child to run if parent
terminates

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Cooperating Processes
 Independent process cannot affect or be affected by the execution of
another process
 Cooperating (dependent ) process can affect or be affected by the
execution of another process
 Reasons for cooperating processes:
 Information sharing
 Computation speedup
 Convenience
 Modularity. We may want to construct the system in a modular fashion,
dividing the system functions into separate processes or threads

 Cooperating processes need interprocess communication (IPC)

 Two models of IPC
 Shared memory
 Message passing

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 Communications Models
(a) Message passing. (b) shared memory.

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 Interprocess Communication – Shared Memory

 An area of memory shared among the processes that wish

to communicate
 The communication is under the control of the users
processes not the operating system.
 Major issues is to provide mechanism that will allow the
user processes to synchronize their actions when they
access shared memory.
 Synchronization is discussed in great details in Chapter 4.

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 Tight coupled Vs Loosely Coupled Systems

Tight Coupled Systems

Loosely Coupled Systems

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Shared Memory Ex: Producer-Consumer problem

 There are two processes: Producer and Consumer.

 Producer produces some item and Consumer consumes that item.
 The two processes share a common space or memory location known as a
buffer where the item produced by Producer is stored and from which the
Consumer consumes the item, if needed.
 There are two versions of this problem:
 The first one is known as unbounded buffer problem in which Producer can
keep on producing items and there is no limit on the size of the buffer,
 The second one is known as the bounded buffer problem in which Producer
can produce up to a certain number of items before it starts waiting for
Consumer to consume it.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Shared Memory Ex: Producer-Consumer problem

 Lab. Tasks:
1. Write, debug and run code for the Producer-Consumer
problem.
For the implementation of this problem, see book page 47.
2. Write, debug and run code for illustrating differences
between tight coupling and loose coupling
 Submit the code and screenshots from the results.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Interprocess Communication – Message Passing
 This method is a Mechanism for processes to communicate
and to synchronize their actions
 Message system – processes communicate with each other
without resorting to shared variables
 If two processes process1 and process2 want to
communicate with each other, they proceed as follows:
1. Establish a communication link (if a link already exists, no need to
establish it again.)
2. Start exchanging messages using basic primitives. We need at least
two primitives.
 send (message, destination) or send(message)
 receive (message, host) or receive(message)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Interprocess Communication – Message Passing
Types
 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
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Interprocess Communication – Message Passing
Synchronization
 Message passing may be either blocking or non-blocking
 Blocking is considered synchronous
 Blocking send -- the sender is blocked until the message is
received
 Blocking receive -- the receiver is blocked until a message
is available
 Non-blocking is considered asynchronous
 Non-blocking send -- the sender sends the message and
continue
 Non-blocking receive -- the receiver receives:
 A valid message, or
 Null message

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Examples of IPC used in some OSes
 POSIX Threads, usually referred to as pthreads,
 Is an execution model that exists independently from a
language, as well as a parallel execution model.
 It allows a program to control multiple different flows of
work that overlap in time.
 It uses shared memory method.
 Mach: uses message passing
 Windows: uses message passing using local procedural calls ,

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Interprocess Communication – Message Passing
Buffering

 Queue of messages attached to the link.

 implemented in one of three ways
1. Zero capacity – no messages are queued on a link.
Sender must wait for receiver (rendezvous)
2. Bounded capacity – finite length of n messages
Sender must wait if link queue (buffer) is full
3. Unbounded capacity – infinite length
Sender never waits

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Communications in Client-Server Systems
Examples
 Sockets
 Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
 Remote Method Invocation (RMI) (Java)
 Pipes ( Research)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Sockets
 A socket is defined as an endpoint for communication

 Concatenation of IP address and port – a number included at

start of message packet to differentiate network services on a
host

 The socket 161.25.19.8:1625 refers to port 1625 on host

161.25.19.8

 Communication consists between a pair of sockets

 All ports below 1024 are well known, used for standard
services

 Special IP address 127.0.0.1 (loopback) to refer to system on

which process is running

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Socket Communication

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Remote Procedure Calls
 Remote procedure call (RPC) abstracts procedure calls
between processes on networked systems
 Again uses ports for service differentiation
 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 performs the procedure on the
server
 On Windows, stub code compile from specification written in
Microsoft Interface Definition Language (MIDL)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 3.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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.

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 Marshalling Parameters

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 ‫ على حضوركم‬.. ‫شكرا لكم‬
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