Here in this section of Operating System Long Questions and Answers,We have listed out some of the important Long Questions with Answers on What is Process, Multiprogramming, Context switching ? which will help students to answer it correctly in their University Written Exam.Lists of Long Descriptive type Questions that may be asked in Written Exams.
- What is Process? Give the difference between Process and Program.
- What is multiprogramming?
- What is context switching?
Question-1 what is Process? Give the difference between Process and Program.
Process:
- Process is a program under execution.
- It is an instance of an executing program, including the current values of the program counter, registers & variables.
- Process is an abstraction of a running program.
| Process | Program |
| A process is program in execution. | A program is set of instructions. |
| A process is an active/ dynamic entity. | A program is a passive/ static entity. |
| A process has a limited life span. It is created when execution starts andterminated as execution is finished. | A program has a longer life span. It is stored on disk forever. |
| A process contains various resources like memory address, disk, printeretc… as per requirements. | A program is stored on disk in some file.It does not contain any other resource. |
| A process contains memory address which is called address space. | A program requires memory space on disk to store all instructions. |
Question-2 what is multiprogramming?
A process is just an executing program, including the current values of the program counter, registers, and variables.
- Conceptually, each process has its own virtual CPU.
- In reality, the real CPU switches back and forth from process to process, but to understand the system, it is much easier to think about a collection of processes running in
- (pseudo) parallel, than to try to keep track of how the CPU switches from program to program.
- This rapid switching back and forth is called multiprogramming and the number of processes loaded simultaneously in memory is called degree of multiprogramming.
Question-3 what is context switching?
- Switching the CPU to another process requires saving the state of the old process and loading the saved state for the new process.
- This task is known as a context switch.
- The context of a process is represented in the PCB of a process; it includes the value of the CPU registers, the process state and memory-management information.
- When a context switch occurs, the kernel saves the context of the old process in its PCB and loads the saved context of the new process scheduled to run.
- Context-switch time is pure overhead, because the system does no useful work while switching.
- Its speed varies from machine to machine, depending on the memory speed, the number of registers that must be copied, and the existence of special instructions.
