In computing, multitasking is the concurrent execution of multiple tasks over a certain period of time. New tasks can interrupt already started ones before they finish, instead of waiting for them to end. As a result, a computer executes segments of multiple tasks in an interleaved manner, while the tasks share common processing resources such as central processing units (CPUs) and main memory. Multitasking automatically interrupts the running program, saving its state and loading the saved state of another program and transferring control to it. This "context switch" may be initiated at fixed time intervals, or the running program may be coded to signal to the supervisory software when it can be interrupted.
A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) intended to serve real-time applications that process data as it comes in, typically without buffer delays. Processing time requirements are measured in tenths of seconds or shorter increments of time. A real-time system is a time-bound system which has well-defined, fixed time constraints. Processing must be done within the defined constraints or the system will fail. They either are event-driven or time-sharing. Event-driven systems switch between tasks based on their priorities, while time-sharing systems switch the task based on clock interrupts. Most RTOSs use a pre-emptive scheduling algorithm.
In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very large (main) memory".
In computer science, mutual exclusion is a property of concurrency control, which is instituted for the purpose of preventing race conditions. It is the requirement that one thread of execution never enters a critical section while a concurrent thread of execution is already accessing critical section, which refers to an interval of time during which a thread of execution accesses a shared resource, such as [Shared data objects, shared resources, shared memory].
In computing, a process is the instance of a computer program that is being executed by one or many threads. It contains the program code and its activity. Depending on the operating system (OS), a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently.
In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by a scheduler, which is typically a part of the operating system. The implementation of threads and processes differs between operating systems, but in most cases a thread is a component of a process. Multiple threads can exist within one process, executing concurrently and sharing resources such as memory, while different processes do not share these resources. In particular, the threads of a process share its executable code and the values of its dynamically allocated variables and non-thread-local global variables at any given time.
In computing, scheduling is the action of assigning resources to perform tasks. The resources may be processors, network links or expansion cards. The tasks may be threads, processes or data flows.
Round-robin (RR) is one of the algorithms employed by process and network schedulers in computing. As the term is generally used, time slices are assigned to each process in equal portions and in circular order, handling all processes without priority. Round-robin scheduling is simple, easy to implement, and starvation-free. Round-robin scheduling can be applied to other scheduling problems, such as data packet scheduling in computer networks. It is an operating system concept.
In software engineering, a spinlock is a lock which causes a thread trying to acquire it to simply wait in a loop ("spin") while repeatedly checking if the lock is available. Since the thread remains active but is not performing a useful task, the use of such a lock is a kind of busy waiting. Once acquired, spinlocks will usually be held until they are explicitly released, although in some implementations they may be automatically released if the thread being waited on blocks, or "goes to sleep".
Memory segmentation is an operating system memory management technique of division of a computer's primary memory into segments or sections. In a computer system using segmentation, a reference to a memory location includes a value that identifies a segment and an offset within that segment. Segments or sections are also used in object files of compiled programs when they are linked together into a program image and when the image is loaded into memory.
Micro-Controller Operating Systems is a real-time operating system (RTOS) designed Jean J. Labrosse in 1991. It is a priority-based preemptive real-time kernel for microprocessors, written mostly in the programming language C. It is intended for use in embedded systems.
In computer science, a multilevel feedback queue is a scheduling algorithm. Solaris 2.6 Time-Sharing (TS) scheduler implements this algorithm. The MacOS and Microsoft Windows schedulers can both be regarded as examples of the broader class of multilevel feedback queue schedulers. This scheduling algorithm is intended to meet the following design requirements for multimode systems:
- Give preference to short jobs.
- Give preference to I/O bound processes.
- Separate processes into categories based on their need for the processor.
Shortest job next (SJN), also known as shortest job first (SJF) or shortest process next (SPN), is a scheduling policy that selects for execution the waiting process with the smallest execution time. SJN is a non-preemptive algorithm. Shortest remaining time is a preemptive variant of SJN.
In computer science, a fiber is a particularly lightweight thread of execution.
The stride scheduling is a type of scheduling mechanism that has been introduced as a simple concept to achieve proportional CPU capacity reservation among concurrent processes. Stride scheduling aims to sequentially allocate a resource for the duration of standard time-slices (quantum) in a fashion, that performs periodic recurrences of allocations. Thus, a process p1 which has reserved twice the share of a process p2 will be allocated twice as often as p2. In particular, process p1 will even be allocated two times every time p2 is waiting for allocation, assuming that neither of the two processes performs a blocking operation.
In computing, the producer–consumer problem is a classic example of a multi-process synchronization problem, the first version of which was proposed by Edsger W. Dijkstra in 1965 in his unpublished manuscript, in which the buffer was unbounded, and subsequently published with a bounded buffer in 1972. In the first version of the problem, there are two cyclic processes, a producer and a consumer, which share a common, fixed-size buffer used as a queue. The producer repeatedly generates data and writes it into the buffer. The consumer repeatedly reads the data in the buffer, removing it in the course of reading it, and using that data in some way. In the first version of the problem, with an unbounded buffer, the problem is how to design the producer and consumer code so that, in their exchange of data, no data is lost or duplicated, data is read by the consumer in the order it is written by the producer, and both processes make as much progress as possible. In the later formulation of the problem, Dijkstra proposed multiple producers and consumers sharing a finite collection of buffers. This added the additional problem of preventing producers from trying to write into buffers when all were full, and trying to prevent consumers from reading a buffer when all were empty.
Input/output (I/O) scheduling is the method that computer operating systems use to decide in which order the block I/O operations will be submitted to storage volumes. I/O scheduling is sometimes called disk scheduling.
A clustered file system is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system. Clustered file systems can provide features like location-independent addressing and redundancy which improve reliability or reduce the complexity of the other parts of the cluster. Parallel file systems are a type of clustered file system that spread data across multiple storage nodes, usually for redundancy or performance.
A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of changes not yet committed to the file system's main part by recording the goal of such changes in a data structure known as a "journal", which is usually a circular log. In the event of a system crash or power failure, such file systems can be brought back online more quickly with a lower likelihood of becoming corrupted.
Earliest deadline first (EDF) or least time to go is a dynamic priority scheduling algorithm used in real-time operating systems to place processes in a priority queue. Whenever a scheduling event occurs the queue will be searched for the process closest to its deadline. This process is the next to be scheduled for execution.