Advanced Operating Systems (Distributed Systems) Unit 7

Unit 7 Process Management

Structure:
7.1 Introduction
Objectives
7.2 Process Migration
7.3 Threads
7.4 Terminal Questions

7.1 Introduction
The notion of a process is central to the understanding of operating
systems. There are quite a few definitions presented in the literature, but no
"perfect" definition has yet appeared.

Definition
The term "process" was first used by the designers of the MULTICS in
1960's. Since then, the term process is used somewhat interchangeably
with 'task' or 'job'. The process has been given many definitions, for
instance:
A program in Execution.
An asynchronous activity.
The 'animated spirit' of a procedure in execution.
The entity to which processors are assigned.
The 'dispatchable' unit.

and many more definitions have been given. As we can see from the above
that there is no universally agreed upon definition, but the definition
"Program in Execution" seems to be most frequently used. And this is a
concept used in the present study of operating systems.

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Now that we have agreed upon the definition of process, the question is
what is the relation between process and program. It is same beast with
different name or when this beast is sleeping (not executing) it is called
program and when it is executing it becomes process. Well, to be very
precise, a Process is not the same as program. In the following discussion
we point out some of the differences between process and program.

Process is not the same as program. A process is more than a program

code. A process is an 'active' entity as opposed to program which is
considered to be a 'passive' entity. As we all know a program is an algorithm
expressed in some suitable notation, (e.g., programming language). Being
passive, a program is only a part of process. Process, on the other hand,
includes:
Current value of Program Counter (PC)
Contents of the processors registers
Value of the variables
The process stack (SP) which typically contains temporary data such as
subroutine parameter, return address, and temporary variables.
A data section that contains global variables.

A process is the unit of work in a system.

In Process model, all software on the computer is organized into a number

of sequential processes. A process includes PC, registers, and variables.
Conceptually, each process has its own virtual CPU. In reality, the CPU
switches back and forth among processes. (The rapid switching back and
forth is called multiprogramming).

Process Management
In a conventional (or centralized) operating system, process management
deals with mechanisms and policies for sharing the processor of the system
among all processes. In a Distributed Operating system, the main goal of

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process management is to make the best possible use of the processing

resources of the entire system by sharing them among all the processes.
Three important concepts are used in distributed operating systems to
achieve this goal:
1. Processor Allocation: It deals with the process of deciding which
process should be assigned to which processor.
2. Process Migration: It deals with the movement of a process from its
current location to the processor to which it has been assigned.
3. Threads: They deal with fine-grained parallelism for better utilization of
the processing capability of the system.

This unit describes the concepts of process migration and threads.

Issues in Process Management

Transparent relocation of processes
– Preemptive process migration – costly
– Non-preemptive process migration
Selecting the source and destination nodes for migration
Cost of migration – size of the address space and time taken to migrate
Address space transfer mechanisms – total freezing, pre-transfering,
transfer on reference
Message forwarding for migrated processes
– Resending the message
– The origin site mechanism
– Link traversal mechanism
– Link update mechanism
Process migration in heterogeneous systems

Objectives:
This unit introduces the reader management of processes present in a
distributed network. It discusses the differences between the processes
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running on a uni-processor system and processes running on a distributed

system in specific. It speaks about process migration mechanisms in which
the processes may be shifted or migrated to different machines on the
network depending on the availability of resources to complete the process
execution. It also discusses the concept of threads, their mechanisms, and
differences between a thread and a process on uni-processor system and a
distributed system.

7.2 Process Migration

Definition:
The relocation of a process from its current location (the source system) to
some other location (Destination).

A process may be migrated either before it starts executing on its source

node or during the course of its execution. The former is known as
pre-emptive process migration.

Process migration involves the following steps:

1. Selection of a process to be migrated
2. Selection of destination system or node
3. Actual transfer of the selected process to the destination system or node

The following are the desirable features of a good process migration

mechanism:

A good process migration mechanism must possess transparency, minimal

interferences, minimal residual dependencies, efficiency, and robustness.

i) Transparency: Levels of transparency:

Access to objects such as files and devices should be done in a
location-independent manner. To accomplish this, system should
provide a mechanism for transparent object naming.

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System calls should be location-independent. However, system

calls related to physical properties of node need not be location-
independent.
Interprocess communication should be transparent. Messages
sent to a migrated process should be delivered to the process
transparently; i.e. the sender doesn’t have to resend it.

ii) Minimal Interference: Migration of a process should involve minimal

interference to the progress of the process and to the system as a
whole. For example, minimize freezing time; can be done by partial
transfer.

iii) Minimal residual dependencies: Migrated process should not continue

to depend in any way on its previous node, because such dependency
can diminish the benefits of migrating and also the failure of the previous
node will cause the process to fail.

iv) Efficiency: Time required for migrating a process and cost of supporting
remote execution should be minimized.

v) Robustness: Failure of any node other than the one on which the
process is running should not affect the execution of the process.

Process Migration Mechanism

Migration of a process is a complex activity that involves proper handling of
several sub-activities in order to meet the requirements of a good process
migration mechanism. The four major subactivities involved in process
migration are as follows:
1. Freezing the process and restarting on another node.
2. Transferring the process’ address space from its source node to its
destination node
3. Forwarding messages meant for the migrant process

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4. Handling communication between cooperating processes that have

been separated as a result of process migration.

The commonly used mechanisms for handling each of these subactivities

are described below:

1. Mechanisms for freezing the process:

In pre-emptive process migration, the usual process is to take a “snapshot”
of the process’ on its source node and reinstate the snapshot on the
destination node. For this, at some point during migration, the process is
frozen on its source node, its state information is transferred to its
destination node, and the process is restarted on its destination node using
this state information. By freezing this process, we mean that the execution
of the process is suspended and all external interactions with the process
are deferred.

Some general issues involved in these operations are described below:

i) Immediate and delayed blocking: When can these two approaches be
used?
If the process is not executing a system call, it can be blocked
immediately.
If a process is executing a system call, it may or may not be
possible to block it immediately, depending on the situation and
implementation.
ii) Fast and slow I/O operations: It is feasible to wait for fast I/O
operations (e.g. disk I/O) after blocking. However, not feasible to wait
for slow I/O operations such as terminal. But proper mechanisms are
necessary for these I/O operations to continue.
iii) Information about open files: Names of files, file descriptors, current
modes, current position of their file pointers, etc need to preserved and

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transferred. Also, temporary files would more efficiently be created at

the node on which the process is executing.
iv) Reinstating the process on the destination node: This involves
creating an empty process on the destination node, and the state of
the transferred process is copied into the empty process and is
unfrozen.
v) Address Transfer mechanisms: Migration of a process involves the
transfer of the process state (includes contents of registers, memory
tables, I/O states, process identifiers, etc.) and the process’s address
space (i.e., code, data, and the program stack).

There are three ways to transfer the address space:

a) Total freezing: Process execution is stopped while the address
space is being transferred. It is simple but inefficient
b) Pre-transferring: The address space is transferred while the
process is still running on the source node. Pre-transfer is
followed by repeated transfer of pages modified during the
transfer.
c) Transfer on reference: Only part of the address space is
transferred. The rest of the address space is transferred only on
demand.
vi) Message forwarding mechanisms: After the process has been
migrated, messages bound for that process should be forwarded to its
current node. The following are the three types of messages:
a) messages received at the source after the process execution is
stopped at the source but the process was not started at the new
node;
b) messages received at the source node after the process has
started executing at the destination;

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c) messages to be sent to the migrant process from any other node

after the process started executing at the destination.

Message Forwarding Mechanisms

In moving a message, it must be ensured that all pending, en-route, and
future messages arrive at the process’s new location. The messages to be
forwarded to the migrant process’s new location can be classified into the
following:

Type 1: Messages received at the source node after the process’s

execution has been stopped on its source node and the process’s execution
has not yet been started on its destination node.

Type 2: Messages received at the source node after the process’s

execution has started on its destination node.

Type 3: Messages that are to be sent to the migrant process from any other
node after it has started executing on the destination node.

The different mechanisms used for message forwarding in existing

distributed systems are described below:

1. Resending the message: Instead of the source node forwarding the

messages received for the migrated process, it notifies the sender about
the status of the process. The sender locates the process and resends
the message.

2. Origin site mechanism: Process’s origin site is embedded in the

process identifier.
Each site is responsible for keeping information about the current
locations of all the processes created on it.
Messages are always sent to the origin site. The origin site then
forwards it to the process’s current location.

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A drawback of this approach is that the failure of the origin site will
disrupt the message forwarding .
Another drawback is that there is continuous load on the origin site.

3. Link traversal mechanism: A forwarding address is left at the source

node
The forwarding address has two components
– The first component is a system-wide unique process identifier,
consisting of (id of the node on which the process was created,
local pid)
– The second component is the known location of the process.
This component is updated when the corresponding process is
accessed form the node.

Co-processes Handling Mechanisms

In systems that allow process migration, an important issue is the necessity
to provide efficient communication between a process (parent) and its
sub-processes (children), which might have been migrated and placed on
different nodes. The two different mechanisms used by existing distributed
operating systems to take care of this problem are described below:

1. Disallowing separation of co-processes: There are two ways to do

this
Disallow migration of processes that wait for one or more of their
children to complete.
Migrate children processes along with their parent process.

2. Home node or origin site concept: This approach.

Allows the processes and sub-processes to migrate independently.
All communication between the parent and children processes take
place via the home node.

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Process Migration in Heterogeneous Systems

Following are the ways to handle heterogeneous systems
Use external data representation mechanism to handle this.
Issues related to handling floating point representation need to be
addressed. i.e., number of bits allocated to mantissa and exponent
should be at least as large as the largest representation in the system.
Signed infinity and signed 0 representation: Not all nodes in the system
may support this.

Process Migration Merits

Reducing the average response time of the processes
Speeding up individual jobs
Gaining higher throughput
Utilizing resources effectively
Reducing network traffic
Improving system reliability
Improving system security

7.3 Threads
Threads are a popular way to improve application performance through
parallelism. In traditional operating systems the basic unit of CPU utilization
is a process. Each process has its own program counter, register states,
stack, and address space. In operating systems with threads facility, the
basic unit of CPU utilization is a thread. In these operating systems, a
process consists of an address space and one or more threads of control.
Each thread of a process has its own program counter, register states, and
stack. But all the threads of a process share the same address space.
Hence they also share the same global variables. In addition, all threads of
a process also share the same set of operating system resources such as

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open files, child processes, semaphores, signals, accounting information,

and so on. Threads share the CPU in the same way as processes do. i.e. on
a uni-processor system, threads run in a time-sharing mode, whereas on a
shared memory multi-processor, as many threads can run simultaneously
as there are processors. Akin to traditional processes, threads can create
child threads, can block waiting for system calls to complete, and can
change states during their course of execution. At a particular instance of
time, a thread can be in any one of several states: Running, Blocked,
Ready, or Terminated. In operating systems with threading facility, a
process having a single thread corresponds to a process of a traditional
operating system. Threads are referred to as lightweight processes and
traditional processes are referred to as heavyweight processes.

Why Threads?
Some of the limitations of the traditional process model are listed below:

1. Many applications wish to perform several largely independent tasks

that can run concurrently, but must share the same address space and
other resources.
For example, a database server or file server UNIX’s make facility allows
users to compile several files in parallel, using separate processes for
each.
2. Creating several processes and maintaining them involves lot of
overhead. When a context switch occurs, the state information of the
process (register values, page tables, file descriptors, outstanding I/O
requests, etc) need to be saved.
3. On UNIX systems, new processes are created using the fork system
call. fork is an expensive system call.
4. Processes cannot take advantage of multiprocessor architectures,
because a process can only use one processor at a time. An application

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must create a number of processes and dispatch them to the available

processors.
5. Switching between threads sharing the same address space is
considerably cheaper than switching between processes The traditional
UNIX process is single-threaded.

Consider a set of single threaded processes executing on a Uni - processor

machine. The first three processes were spawned by a server in response
to three clients. The lower two processes run some other server application

Figure 7.1: Traditional UNIX system – Uniprocessor with

single-threaded processes

Two servers running on a uni – processor system. Each server runs as a

single process, with multiple threads sharing a single address space. Inter-
thread context-switching can be handled by either the OS kernel or a user-
level threads library.

Eliminating multiple nearly identical address spaces for each application

reduces the load on the memory subsystem.

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Disadvantage: Multithreaded processes must be concerned with

synchronizing the access to the objects by several of their own threads.

Two Multithreaded processes running on a multiprocessor. All threads of

one process share the same address space, but run on different processors.
We get improved performance but synchronization is more complicated.

Figure 7.2: Multithreaded Processes in a Multiprocessor System

To summarize:

A Process can be divided into two components – a set of threads and a

collection of resources. The collection of resources include an address
space, open files, user credentials, quotas, etc, that are shared by all
threads in the process.

A Thread
is a dynamic object that represents a control point in the process and
that executes a sequence of instructions.
has its private objects, program counter, stack, and a register context.

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User-level thread libraries.

IEEE POSIX standards group generated several drafts of a threads
package known as pthreads.
Sun’s Solaris OS supports pthreads library. It also has implemented its
own threads library.

Models for Organizing Threads

The following are some ways of organizing threads:

Dispatcher-workers model: Dispatcher thread accepts requests from

clients and dispatches it to one of the appropriate free worker threads for
further processing of the request.

Team Model: All threads behave equal in this model. Each thread gets and
process’s client’s request on its own Pipline model: In this model, threads
are arranged in a pipeline so that output data generated by the first thread is
used for processing by the second thread, output by second thread is used
by the third....

User-level Threads Libraries

The interface provided by the threads package must include several
important facilities such as for:
Creating and terminating threads
Suspending and resuming threads
Assigning priorities to the individual threads
Thread scheduling and context switching
Synchronizing activities through facilities such as semaphores and
mutual exclusion locks
Sending messages from one thread to another

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Case Study – DCE threads

DCE threads comply with IEEE POSIX (Portable OS interface) standard
known as P-Threads.
DCE provides a set of user-level library procedures for the creation and
maintenance of threads.
To access the thread services DCE provides an API that is compatible to
the POSIX standard.
If a system supporting DCE has no intrinsic support for threads, the API
provides an interface to the thread library that is linked to the application.
If the system supporting DCE has OS kernel support for threads, DCE is
set up to use this facility. In this case the API serves as an interface to
kernel supported threads facility.

7.4 Terminal Questions

1. Differentiate between pre-emptive and non-preemptive process
migration. Mention their advantages and disadvantages.
2. Discuss the issues involved in freezing a migrant process on its source
node and restarting it on its destination node.
3. Discuss the threading issues with respect to process management in a
DSM system.

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