Process Management

 

A process is a program in execution. It is a unit of work within the system. Program is a passive entity, process is an active entity.

Process needs resources to accomplish its task

CPU, memory, I/O, files

Initialization data

Process termination requires reclaim of any reusable resources

Single-threaded process has one program counter specifying location of next instruction to execute

Process executes instructions sequentially, one at a time, until completion

Multi-threaded process has one program counter per thread

Typically system has many processes, some user, some operating system running concurrently on one or more CPUs

Concurrency by multiplexing the CPUs among the processes / threads