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In computer science and software engineering, busy-waiting, busy-looping or spinning is a technique in which a process repeatedly checks to see if a condition is true, such as whether keyboard input or a lock is available. Spinning can also be used to generate an arbitrary time delay, a technique that was necessary on systems that lacked a ...
This technique pertains to multitasking operating systems, and is sometimes called a subprocess or traditionally a subtask. There are two major procedures for creating a child process: the fork system call (preferred in Unix-like systems and the POSIX standard) and the spawn (preferred in the modern (NT) kernel of Microsoft Windows , as well as ...
APCs instead are made without waiting for prior calls to complete. For example, if some data are not ready (for example, a program waits for a user to reply), then stopping other activity on the thread is expensive, the thread has consumed memory and potentially other resources.
This approach is called asynchronous input/output. Any task that depends on the I/O having completed (this includes both using the input values and critical operations that claim to assure that a write operation has been completed) still needs to wait for the I/O operation to complete, and thus is still blocked, but other processing that does ...
A data stream similar to a socket, but which usually preserves message boundaries. Typically implemented by the operating system, they allow multiple processes to read and write to the message queue without being directly connected to each other. Most operating systems Anonymous pipe: A unidirectional data channel using standard input and ...
A critical section is typically used when a multi-threaded program must update multiple related variables without a separate thread making conflicting changes to that data. In a related situation, a critical section may be used to ensure that a shared resource, for example, a printer, can only be accessed by one process at a time.
A poll message is a control-acknowledgment message.. In a multidrop line arrangement (a central computer and different terminals in which the terminals share a single communication line to and from the computer), the system uses a master/slave polling arrangement whereby the central computer sends message (called polling message) to a specific terminal on the outgoing line.
The input–process–output model. The input–process–output (IPO) model, or input-process-output pattern, is a widely used approach in systems analysis and software engineering for describing the structure of an information processing program or other process.