ICS 2305 : SYSTEMS PROGRAMMING

PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Karanja Mwangi
Lesson objective

 At the end of this class you will

 Appreciate the concepts of process management as used in
Operating systems
 Identify various commands and constructs used in Process
Management in Linux
 Explore the shell programming aspects in Process
Management
Recap: Processes

 Main Role of OS in processes : is

the creation, management, and termination of
processes
 process?
 a program under execution,
• an identifiable entity executed on a processor by the
operating system.
 In OS terms:
• as an executable instance of a program,
• as the associated data operated upon by the program
(variables, temporary results, external (file) storage, ...), and
as the program's execution context.
Recap: Processes
(View Points)

 The process from two points of view: that of the

processor, and that of the process itself.
 The processor's view : the processor's only role is to
execute machine instructions from main memory. Over time, the
processor continually executes the sequence of instructions
indicated by the program counter (PC). The processor is unaware
that different sequences of instructions have a logical existence,
that different sequences under execution are referred to as
processes or tasks.
 process's point of view, it is either being executed by
the processor, or it is waiting to be executed
Recap:
Process Transitions{Process Creation}

 For a new process, the OS allocate resources

both for the process and the OS itself.
 Ways to create new processes
• OS taking new request from Batch queue
• a user logging on at a terminal usually creates an interactive control
or encapsulating process (shell or command interpreter).
• an existing process may request a new process,
• the operating system itself may create a process after an indirect
request for service (to support networking, printing, ...) etc

 Different operating systems support process

creation in different ways. ( fork() call in macOS
and Linux);by instantiating a process's image from
a named location, the CreateProcess() call in
Windows) etc
Recap:
The 5-State Model of Process Execution

 The William Stallings 5-state model

Recap:
Process Transitions{Five States 1 ….}

 Why Moving from Ready to Running states:

• Mainly for fairness amongst processes and maximal
use of resources
• This is achieved via Timer Interrupts
• A hardware timer will periodically generate an interrupt (say, every 5
milliseconds). Between the execution of any two instructions, the
processor will "look for" interrupts. When the timer interrupt occurs, the
processor will begin execution of the interrupt handler.
• The handler will increment and examine the accumulated time of the
currently executing process, and eventually move it
from Running to Ready.
• A processes have a time quantum (Max time a
process is allowed to execute)
Recap:
Process Transitions{Five States -2 ….}

The Blocked state ?

• It is hard or rare to have compute-
bound processes(processes which continually
execute to the end of their time quanta) ….
• E.g. If a process request an input or output from slow
read and write source it has to get to state which is
not ready or running waiting for I/O requests to be
satisfied
• the process is moved from Running to Blocked and
when I/O interrupt occurs the process moves from
blocked to ready
Recap:
Process Transitions{Five States -3 ….}

The Termination ?
(William Stallings book )
• normal termination,
• execution time-limit exceeded,
• a resource requested is unavailable,
• an arithmetic error (division by zero),
• a memory access violation,
• an invalid request of memory or a held resource,
• an operating system or parent process request, or
• its parent process has terminated.
Swapping? resources such as memory are finite
When none of the processes in main memory is Ready, the
operating system swaps the memory of some of
the Blocked processes to disk to recover some memory space.
Such processes are moved to a new state: the Suspend state, a
queue of processes that have been "kicked out" of main memory:
Recap:
Process Transitions{Summary of states}

Null → New a new process is requested.

New → Ready resources are allocated for the
new process.
Ready → Running a process is given a time
quantum.
Running → Ready a process's execution time
quantum expires.
Running → Blocked a process requests slow I/O.
Blocked → Ready an I/O interrupt signals that I/O is
ready.
Running → Exit normal or abnormal process
termination.
Ready or Blocked → Exit external process termination
requested.
Process Management
in Linux
Linux basics -1
 In Linux/unix a program is identified by its process ID (PID) as well as
it’s parent processes ID (PPID). There are two types of processes
 Parent processes – these are processes that create other processes during run-
time.
 Child processes – these processes are created by other processes during run-
time.
 The init Process mother (parent) of all processes on the system, it’s
the first program that is executed when the boots up; it manages all
other processes on the system. It is started by the kernel itself, so in
principle it does not have a parent process.

 The init process always has process ID of 1. It functions as an adoptive parent

for all orphaned processes.
Daemons : type of background processes that start at system startup and keep
running forever as a service; they don’t die. They are started as system tasks (run
as services), spontaneously. However, they can be controlled by a user via the init
process

States of a Process in Linux (Running , waiting, stopped and

Zombie{dead or halted process})
Linux basics -2
 # - for root privileges or use of sudo command
 $ - regular non-privileged user

Few command to exercise on (Lets do this now )

$ ps - shows the snapshot of all programs in execution

sudo ps –a ps –A
sudo ps -U karanja

There are too many outputs so we can do more or less

ps -aux | more
sudo ps -aux | less

pidof mysqld will get the pid of the mysqld program

pgrep mysql

ps aux | grep mysqld …..better output of the same

Linux basics -3

 There are Foreground and Background Processes in Linux

 Foreground like user apps such as Libre office etc , background such as
antivirus etc
 To start a foreground process just type in the terminal or search it on the
dashboard
bg To send a process to the background
To run a stopped process in the
fg
foreground

…..Open a program say Vlc from the terminal …..bg vlc

( of course it will be a foreground process make it background)
.
Linux basics -4 Controlling processes
 using Commands such as kill, pkill, pgrep and killall
$ kill –l
 SIGHUP 1 – sent to a process when its controlling terminal is closed.
 SIGINT 2 – sent to a process by its controlling terminal when a user
interrupts the process by pressing [Ctrl+C].
 SIGQUIT 3 – sent to a process if the user sends a quit signal [Ctrl+D].
 SIGKILL 9 – this signal immediately terminates (kills) a process and the
process will not perform any clean-up operations.
 SIGTERM 15 – this a program termination signal (kill will send this by
default).
 SIGTSTP 20 – sent to a process by its controlling terminal to request it to
stop (terminal stop); initiated by the user pressing [Ctrl+Z].
 Run this to see all options $ kill -l
Kill using process ID
$ kill 9 5717 where 9 is the SIGKILL 9 and 5717 is the Process ID
$ kill PID1 PID2 PID3 to kill many processes
Kill using process name
$ pkill firefox
$ killall firefox
Linux basics -5 Controlling processes
 using Commands such as kill, pkill, pgrep and killall notes

 A user can kill all his process.

 A user can not kill another user’s process.
 A user can not kill processes System is using.
 A root user can kill System-level-process and the process of any user.

 $ pgrep process
Such as $ pgrep vlc
Linux basics -6 Controlling processes
 Changing linux programs priorities
 We know that - higher priority will normally get more CPU time than lower
priority processes
 the process have to wait for other processes to free resources before it
can access them
 The less the value, the highest the priority of the process. Values
ussually between -20 to 19

nice and renice commands are used

First we run $ top ….its variants are

$htop
$sudo htop
$sudo htop [options]

Then …..
$ nice -n 19 ./script.sh

$ renice +8 5717
Good tools to have : dstat or sysstat

 For process Monitoring

 Install it : sudo apt-get install dstat
 Use the tool glances …# glances

 Better if you get sysstat

 # wget http://pagesperso-orange.fr/sebastien.godard/sysstat-11.0.0.tar.gz
Configure it
 # tar -xvf sysstat-11.0.0.tar.gz
 # cd sysstat-11.0.0/

 For more http://sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr/download.html

Read on
 Using C programming
 Creating a new process using fork() system call
 CREATING multiple processes using fork () and pipe()
 Demonstrate the concept of Orphan Process.
 Using execv and execvp system calls

 Good source :https://www.usna.edu/Users/cs/aviv/classes/ic221/s16/lec/14/lec.html#orgheadline7

 You can use this to get a basic appreciation
 https://home.deib.polimi.it/fornacia/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=teaching:aos:2016:aos201617
_multiprocess_programming_updated20161223.pdf
 https://linuxhint.com/fork_linux_system_call_c/
 https://www.csl.mtu.edu/cs4411.ck/www/NOTES/process/fork/create.html
 https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/fork-system-call/
 https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/zombie-and-orphan-processes-in-c/