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Operating System Design, 3rd Edition
book

Operating System Design, 3rd Edition

by Douglas Comer
May 2025
Intermediate to advanced
573 pages
14h 38m
English
Chapman and Hall/CRC
Content preview from Operating System Design, 3rd Edition

5 Scheduling And Context Switching

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

— Max Jacob

5.1 Introduction

An operating system achieves the illusion of concurrent execution by rapidly switching a processor among several computations. Because the speed of the computation is extremely fast compared to that of a human, the effect is impressive — multiple activities appear to proceed simultaneously.

Context switching, which lies at the heart of the juggling act, consists of stopping the current process, saving enough information so it may be restarted later, and starting another process. What makes such a change difficult is that the processor cannot be stopped during a context switch ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781040345764