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A Detailed Look at Operating System Processes
B. H. Venter
Department of Computer Science, University of Port Elizabeth P.O. Box 1600, Port Elizabeth, 6000 South Africa,
e-mail: csabhv@upe.ac.za (now hermanv@microsoft.com)

Abstract

An operating system provides, among other things, an operational definition of a process. The concept of a process is one of the fundamental concepts of Computer Science, and the designer of an operating system must strive to provide a definition that is simple to understand, does not violate the intuitive notions one has about processes, and is simple to implement efficiently on a wide range of computer systems. On the other hand, the definition should not fail to provide the functionality that existing operating systems have, by user demand, gradually evolved into providing. This paper presents a framework for discussing the operational definition of a process, and uses this framework to discuss systematically some of the more important decisions and trade-offs regarding processes, that the designer of a new operating system must make.

Keywords: operating systems, process, light-weight process, memory-sharing, interrupts, exceptions, real-time

Computing Review Category: D.4.1 OPERATING SYSTEMS, Process Management

Received June 1987, Accepted July 1987 ]




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Prof Herman Venter
Tue May 7 09:30:30 GMT 1996