Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

Terminology

Recall that we are using the classical term process to indicate an active element in a system. Many current systems denote their practical unit of scheduling as a thread. Before Section 4.11 the term thread can be used interchangeably with process for the unit of scheduling. Later sections discuss the implementation of concurrent programs and need to distinguish between the unit of resource allocation (process) and the unit of scheduling (process or thread, depending on whether the system supports multi-threaded processes).