1. Processes Overview: Process Concept Process Scheduling
Operations on Processes
Interprocess Communication
Communication in Client-Server Systems

2. 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.

3. Process in Memory

4. 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

5. Diagram of Process State

6. 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.

7. Process Control Block (PCB)

8. CPU Switch From Process to Process

9. 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

10. Ready Queue And Various I/O Device Queues

11. Representation of Process Scheduling

12. 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

13. Addition of Medium Term Scheduling

14. 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

15. 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.

16. 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 parent’s resources
Parent and child share no resources
Execution
Parent and children execute concurrently
Parent can wait/not wait until children terminate

17. 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

18. Process Creation

19. 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

20. 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)

21. 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?

22. Communications Models

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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.

27. 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

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

29. Client-Server Communication
Sockets
Remote Procedure Calls
Remote Method Invocation (Java)

30. Sockets A socket is defined as an endpoint for communication
Concatenation of IP address and port number
The socket :1625 refers to port 1625 on host with IP address
Communication takes place between a pair of sockets

31. Socket Communication

32. 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.

33. Execution of RPC

34. 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.