Chapter 3 - Process description and control. After studying this chapter, you should be able to: Define the term process and explain the relationship between processes and process control blocks, explain the concept of a process state and discuss the state transitions the processes undergo, list and describe the purpose of the data structures and data structure elements used by an OS to manage processes. | Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles Chapter 3 Process Description and Control Seventh Edition By William Stallings Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles The concept of process is fundamental to the structure of modern computer operating systems. Its evolution in analyzing problems of synchronization, deadlock, and scheduling in operating systems has been a major intellectual contribution of computer science. WHAT CAN BE AUTOMATED?: THE COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING RESEARCH STUDY, MIT Press, 1980 A computer platform consists of a collection of hardware resources Computer applications are developed to perform some task It is inefficient for applications to be written directly for a given hardware platform The OS was developed to provide a convenient, feature-rich, secure, and consistent interface for applications to use We can think of the OS as providing a uniform, abstract representation of resources that can be requested and accessed by applications OS Management of Application Execution Resources are made available to multiple applications The processor is switched among multiple applications so all will appear to be progressing The processor and I/O devices can be used efficiently Two essential elements of a process are: When the processor begins to execute the program code, we refer to this executing entity as a .
