Computer Science Illuminated, 7th Edition

10.3 Process Management

Another important resource that an operating system must manage is the use of the CPU by individual processes. To understand how an operating system manages processes, we must recognize the stages that a process goes through during its computational life and understand the information that must be managed to keep a process working correctly in a computer system.

The Process States

Processes move through specific states as they are managed in a computer system. That is, a process enters the system, is ready to be executed, is executing, is waiting for a resource, or is finished. FIGURE 10.9 depicts these process states. In the figure, each box represents a state a process might be in, and the arrows indicate how and ...