Operating System Process Synchronization
When two or more process cooperates with each other, their order of execution must be preserved otherwise there can be conflicts in their execution and inappropriate outputs can be produced.
A cooperative process is the one which can affect the execution of other process or can be affected by the execution of other process. Such processes need to be synchronized so that their order of execution can be guaranteed.
Deadlock
Deadlock is a situation that occurs in OS when any process enters a waiting state because another waiting process is holding the demanded resource. Deadlock is a common problem in multi-processing where several processes share a specific type of mutually exclusive resource known as a soft lock or software.
Semaphores in Process Synchronization
Semaphore was proposed by Dijkstra in 1965 which is a very significant technique to manage concurrent processes by using a simple integer value, which is known as a semaphore. Semaphore is simply a variable which is non-negative and shared between threads. This variable is used to solve the critical section problem and to achieve process synchronization in the multiprocessing environment.
Cooperating processes in the Operating System
In the computer system, there are many processes which may be either independent processes or cooperating processes that run in the operating system. A process is said to be independent when it cannot affect or be affected by any other processes that are running the system.
Inter Process Communication (IPC)
Inter process communication (IPC) is a mechanism which allows processes to communicate with each other and synchronize their actions. The communication between these processes can be seen as a method of co-operation between them.
Message Passing
The most popular form of interprocess communication involves message passing. Processes communicate with each other by exchanging messages. A process may send information to a port, from which another process may receive information. The sending and receiving processes can be on the same or different computers connected via a communication medium.
Advantages and Disadvanteages of Message Passing Model
One of the advantages of message passing model is message passing model is much easier to implement than the shared memory model. The disadvantage is the message passing model has slower communication than the shared memory model because the connection setup takes time.
Shared Memory Model of Process Communication
Process communication is the mechanism provided by the operating system that allows processes to communicate with each other. This communication could involve a process letting another process know that some event has occurred or transferring of data from one process to another. One of the models of process communication is the shared memory model.
Dining Philosopher Problem Using Semaphores
The dining philosopher is a classic synchronization problem as it demonstrates a large class of concurrency control problems. This website will tell you the details about the definition of dining philosopher, semaphore solution to dining philosopher, and the code.
Understanding Readers-Writers Problem
The readers-writers problem is a classical problem of process synchronization, it relates to a data set such as a file that is shared between more than one process at a time. To undertanding the details of readers-writers problem, this website will help you a lot because it contains about the meaning of readers-writers problem in general, reader process and writer process, complete with their codes.