Process Management

The first major topic we study is process management. We study how process changes state, and how the OS interleaves the execution of multiple processes. Then we study threads and multithreading. Finally, we explore the difficulty of concurrency and the how to synchronize processes/threads properly.

Notes and Samples

Chapter 3. Process description and control (chap3.ppt) Chapter 4. Threads, SMP, and Microkernel (chap4.ppt) Chapter 5. Concurrency: Mutual exclusion and synchronization (chap5.ppt) winproc.zip - a Delphi program that let you suspend and resume processes in Windows

critical.zip - a Delphi program that lets you interactively experiment with 2 software approach to mutual exclusion. One of them is Peterson's algorithm. It also let's you try the semaphore approach. producer.zip - Producer/Consumer problem

Interesting applets

There are many dining philosopher on the web. Just search it using any search engine and you'll find many examples. below are some good ones I can find:

Producer/Consumer workbench Readers Writers Workbench - a Java Applet that demonstrate the Readers / Writers problem. You can single step the threads in the algorithm. Another dining philosopher applet another, with cute animation, and another another, with REAL philosopher, Articles about Multiprogramming and Scheduling About process scheduling in Windows: How Windows NT dispatches processes and threads (Oct 1998) Inside the WinNT Scheduling, Part 1, Part 2 (July 1997) Win2K quantum - an article in www.sysinternals.com about the quantum setting for process scheduling in Windows 2000 About process scheduling in Linux: Process scheduling in Linux - Chap 10 of the book "Understanding the Linux Kernel" The Linux Process Model (in Byte.com) Process Scheduling in Linux (in Byte.com) About process scheduling in Solaris: Process scheduling in Solaris, a series in unixinsider.com: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] (articles off-line at the moment) Articles about Threads and Multithreaded programming About multithreaded programming in Java: List of thread related articles in JavaWorld Programming Java threads in the real world, Part 1- Part 9: an interesting article about threading in Java, synchronization, and some pitfalls Warning! Threading in a multiprocessor world - explain some intricacy in concurrency in multiprocessor environment An alternative way for applet-to-applet communication - an article in JavaWorld that utilizes the fact that applets in multiple browser windows run in the same JVM. About multithreading and multiprocessing in Linux: Linux Threads FAQ The Linux clone() project - clone() is the system call for creating threads in Linux Linux SMP HowTo pThread: POSIX threads (pThread) is a portable thread library in Unix. Its implementation is available in various kinds of Unix, including Linux and Solaris. POSIX threads explained, [1] [2] [3] - a three part article in IBM that shows how to use pThread to create and synchronize threads [yahoo search result] About Solaris: The light weight process pool - an article in UnixInsider that explains how the OS maintains a pool of LWP to satisfy the concurrency of a user process. Multithread programming guide in Solaris 8 - an online book in docs.sun.com about multithreaded programming in the Solaris OS. It uses pThread. A listing of articles about multithreading and synchronization in Dmoz Inter-Process Communication Tutorial, a module in CNE of GMU. Some examples in codeproject - about IPC, incl User-level spinlock Some readings on synchronization and IPC The Little Book of Semaphore