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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.
Mac OS 9 uses cooperative scheduling for threads, where one process controls multiple cooperative threads, and also provides preemptive scheduling for multiprocessing tasks. The kernel schedules multiprocessing tasks using a preemptive scheduling algorithm. All Process Manager processes run within a special multiprocessing task, called the blue ...
In Unix and other POSIX-compatible systems, the parent process can retrieve the exit status of a child process using the wait() family of system calls defined in wait.h. [10] Of these, the waitid() [11] call retrieves the full exit status, but the older wait() and waitpid() [12] calls retrieve only the least significant 8 bits of the exit status.
In many cases programs may appear to be hung, but are making slow progress, and waiting a few minutes will allow the task to complete. Modern operating systems provide a mechanism for terminating hung processes, for instance, with the Unix kill command, or through a graphical means such as the Task Manager's "end task" button in Windows (select the particular process in the list and press "end ...
[44] [45] Activity Monitor appeared in Mac OS X v10.3, when it subsumed the functionality of the programs Process Viewer (a task manager) and CPU Monitor found in the previous version of OS X. [46] [47] In OS X 10.9, Activity Monitor was significantly revamped and gained a fifth tab for "energy" (in addition to CPU, memory, disk, and network). [48]
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 ...
This sequence of operations that stores the state of the running process and loads the following running process is called a context switch. The precise meaning of the phrase "context switch" varies. In a multitasking context, it refers to the process of storing the system state for one task, so that task can be paused and another task resumed.
In operating systems, a task manager is a system monitor program used to provide information about the processes and applications running on a computer, as well as the general status of the computer. Some implementations can also be used to terminate processes and applications, as well as change the processes' scheduling priority .