- 2078 Poush · 3 marks
Process management in OS
Short answer
Process management handles creation, state tracking (ready, running, blocked), scheduling, context switching, synchronization, and inter-process communication to coordinate tasks and avoid races.
Explain process management.
Process management is the part of the OS (kernel) that handles the creation, scheduling, execution, synchronisation and termination of processes (tasks).
Main functions:
- Process creation and termination: creates a process with its control block (PCB/TCB) holding the ID, state, registers, priority, memory and resource information; deletes it when it finishes.
- Process states: tracks new, ready, running, blocked and terminated, moving the process between queues.
- Scheduling: decides which ready process receives the CPU and for how long (FCFS, SJF, round robin, priority).
- Context switching: saves and restores the process state when the CPU is passed on.
- Synchronisation: semaphores and mutexes for coordinating processes and avoiding race conditions.
- Inter-process communication (IPC): pipes, message queues, shared memory.
- Deadlock handling: prevention, avoidance or detection and recovery.
✓ Answer checked by Claude Opus 5.5 (high effort)
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