Chapter 3 - Processes

Question 1

What does a process contain?

Answer 1

1) Program Counter
2) Stack
3) Data Section

Question 2

What are the four aspects of a process?

Answer 2

1) Text Section
2) Stack
3) Data section
4) Heap

Question 3

What is in the text section of a process?

Answer 3

Program code itself

Question 4

What is in a process’s stack?

Answer 4

Temporary data such as function parameters, return addresses, and local variables

Question 5

What is in a process’ data section?

Answer 5

Global variables

Question 6

What is in a process’ heap?

Answer 6

Memory dynamically allocated during run-time

Question 7

What is in the Process Control Block?

Answer 7

Information associated with each process

Question 8

What information does the PCB contain on each process? (6 total)

Answer 8

process state, PC, CPU registers, scheduling information, accounting information, and I/O status information

Question 9

What are the two types of processes and what do they mean?

Answer 9

I/O Bound: spends more time doing I/O (many short CPU bursts)
CPU Bound: spends more time doing computations (few long CPU bursts)

Question 10

What does a context switch do?

Answer 10

When the CPU switches to another process, it saves the state of the old and loads the saved state of the new (from PCB)

Question 11

What is the timing of a context switch depend on?

Answer 11

Hardware

Question 12

How are child processes created?

Answer 12

When a parent process uses the fork() system call

Question 13

What does the PID do?

Answer 13

Allow for process management

Question 14

True or False: Parents and children can share all/some/none resources

Answer 14

True

Question 15

True/False: Parents always wait until children terminate to execute

Answer 15

False

Question 16

How do you create a new process?

Answer 16

With the fork() call

Question 17

What does the exec() system call do?

Answer 17

Used after a fork() to replace the processes’ memory space with a new program

Question 18

What is interprocess communication?

Answer 18

Needed by cooperating processes to share memory or pass messages

Question 19

What are the types of message passing?

Answer 19

Blocking or non-blocking, aka synchronous or asynchronous

Question 20

What does blocking message passing mean?

Answer 20

Blocking Send/Receive has the sender/receiver block until the message is sent/recieved

Question 21

What does non-blocking message send mean?

Answer 21

Non-blocking send has the sender send the message and continue

Question 22

What does non-blocking receive mean?

Answer 22

The receiver receives a valid message or null