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A "ready" or "waiting" process has been loaded into main memory and is awaiting execution on a CPU (to be context switched onto the CPU by the dispatcher, or short-term scheduler). There may be many "ready" processes at any one point of the system's execution—for example, in a one-processor system, only one process can be executing at any one ...
A wait state is a delay experienced by a computer processor when accessing external memory or another device that is slow to respond. Computer microprocessors generally run much faster than the computer's other subsystems, which hold the data the CPU reads and writes.
Processes are also removed from the run queue when they ask to sleep, are waiting on a resource to become available, or have been terminated. In the Linux operating system (prior to kernel 2.6.23), each CPU in the system is given a run queue, which maintains both an active and expired array of processes.
The short-term scheduler (also known as the CPU scheduler) decides which of the ready, in-memory processes is to be executed (allocated a CPU) after a clock interrupt, an I/O interrupt, an operating system call or another form of signal. Thus the short-term scheduler makes scheduling decisions much more frequently than the long-term or mid-term ...
Ready (ready to be executed); Blocked (waiting for an event, I/O for example). Most tasks are blocked or ready most of the time because generally only one task can run at a time per CPU core. The number of items in the ready queue can vary greatly, depending on the number of tasks the system needs to perform and the type of scheduler that the ...
An idle computer has a load number of 0 (the idle process is not counted). Each process using or waiting for CPU (the ready queue or run queue) increments the load number by 1. Each process that terminates decrements it by 1. Most UNIX systems count only processes in the running (on CPU) or runnable (waiting for CPU) states.
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.e. new, ready, running, waiting or terminated). Since it is used to track process information, the PCB plays a key role in context switching. [1]
For the portion of the time required for CPU cycles, the process is being executed and is occupying the CPU. During the time required for I/O cycles, the process is not using the processor. Instead, it is either waiting to perform Input/Output, or is actually performing Input/Output. An example of this is reading from or writing to a file on disk.