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A process is a program in execution, and an integral part of any modern-day operating system (OS). The OS must allocate resources to processes, enable processes to share and exchange information, protect the resources of each process from other processes and enable synchronization among processes.
The operating system holds most of this information about active processes in data structures called process control blocks. Any subset of the resources, typically at least the processor state, may be associated with each of the process' threads in operating systems that support threads or child processes.
A process control block (PCB), also sometimes called a process descriptor, is a data structure used by a computer operating system to store all the information about a process. When a process is created (initialized or installed), the operating system creates a corresponding process control block, which specifies and tracks the process state (i ...
A real-time operating system is an operating system that guarantees to process events or data by or at a specific moment in time. Hard real-time systems require exact timing and are common in manufacturing , avionics , military, and other similar uses. [ 28 ]
A multikernel operating system treats a multi-core machine as a network of independent cores, as if it were a distributed system. It does not assume shared memory but rather implements inter-process communications as message passing. [43] [44] Barrelfish was the first operating system to be described as a multikernel.
The Windows NT operating system family's architecture consists of two layers (user mode and kernel mode), with many different modules within both of these layers.. The architecture of Windows NT, a line of operating systems produced and sold by Microsoft, is a layered design that consists of two main components, user mode and kernel mode.
A formal description of a system, or a detailed plan of the system at component level to guide its implementation. [10] The composite of the design architectures for products and their life-cycle processes. [11] The structure of components, their interrelationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over ...
Unix systems use a centralized operating system kernel which manages system and process activities. All non-kernel software is organized into separate, kernel-managed processes. Unix systems are preemptively multitasking : multiple processes can run at the same time, or within small time slices and nearly at the same time, and any process can ...