Videos: Processes

The process abstraction allows multiple programs and multiple instances of a program to run on the same hardware with no (or, at least, well-defined) interactions among the program instances. The operating system kernel manages processes.

• Process 1: Control flow and kernel   3:31
  Introduction to control flow and exceptions as mediated by an operating system kernel.

• Process 2: Exception handling   2:28
  How the kernel sets up handlers for exceptions, which ultimately allows the kernel to manage processes.

• Process 3: Kinds of exceptions   4:32
  A classification of different kinds of exceptions and how each is normally handled by a kernel.

• Process 4: The process abstraction   3:49
  How the idea of a process allows multiple programs to run on a single machine, and how the kernel rotates among processes through a context switch.

• Process 5: Concurrency   0:50
  A brief aside on how context switches imply concurrency.

• Process 6: top and ps   2:05
  Tools for inspecting the set of running process.

• Process 7: Process control and kill   3:19
  Tools for controlling running processes.

• Process 8: getpid   2:35
  The getpid system call allows a process to get its system-wide identity, while getppid provides the identity of its creating process.

• Process 9: System calls and error checking   5:12
  How system calls report errors, and how those errors must be detected and handled. The csapp.h and csapp.c support files make error handling easier.

• Process 10: Creating processes with fork   4:20
  How fork allows a process to create a new process (and how, eventually, execve, will let us run other programs as new processes).

• Process 11: Process graphs   6:48
  Using a process graph to summarize the sets of processes created by a program and to reason about the resulting concurrency.