26 August, 2011

The lecture will start with a continuation of our unfinished discussion on C programming.

Then, we will delve deeper into process management and introduce the concepts of threads. After this lecture, students should be familiar with the concepts of processes, process control block, process table, context switching, process ID, process management system calls, and multi-threaded processes.

Having a hardcopy of slides during lecture would be helpful. Be prepare to take notes during lecture.

Download Slides: PDF

Download example code here.

Reading:

• Section 2.1 (up to and include 2.1.6): Process
• Section 2.2 (up to and include 2.2.2): Threads

Related Wikipedia entries are listed below. These are for students who are keen to go beyond what is covered in CS2106. Read the articles with a critical mind since Wikipedia is editable by anyone.

• POSIX
• Process Control Block
• Process ID
• Fork
• Child Process
• Parent Process
• Exit
• Wait
• Exec
• Context Switch
• Thread
• Light-weight Process

Here are related man pages: wait | exec | exit | fork