Understanding the Linux Kernel, Second Edition

Process Switch

To control the execution of processes, the kernel must be able to suspend the execution of the process running on the CPU and resume the execution of some other process previously suspended. This activity goes variously by the names process switch , task switch , or context switch . The next sections describe the elements of process switching in Linux.

Hardware Context

While each process can have its own address space, all processes have to share the CPU registers. So before resuming the execution of a process, the kernel must ensure that each such register is loaded with the value it had when the process was suspended.

The set of data that must be loaded into the registers before the process resumes its execution on the CPU is called the hardware context . The hardware context is a subset of the process execution context, which includes all information needed for the process execution. In Linux, a part of the hardware context of a process is stored in the process descriptor, while the remaining part is saved in the Kernel Mode stack.

In the description that follows, we will assume the prev local variable refers to the process descriptor of the process being switched out and next refers to the one being switched in to replace it. We can thus define a process switch as the activity consisting of saving the hardware context of prev and replacing it with the hardware context of next. Since process switches occur quite often, it is important to minimize the time spent ...