March 2003
Intermediate to advanced
912 pages
27h 17m
English
Content preview from Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design
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4.1. Use of processes in systems
 | The designers of early operating systems solved the problems of concurrency and synchronization in an ad hoc way. It was always necessary to support synchronization between programs doing input or output and the corresponding devices, to take account of the great disparity in processor and device speeds. During the 1960s the concept of process came to be used explicitly in operating systems design, for example in Multics (Corbato and Vyssotsky, 1965), THE (Dijkstra, 1968) and RC4000 (Brinch Hansen, 1970). |
One aspect of designing a system is to decide where processes should be used. A natural assignment is to allocate ...