One of the most fundamental concepts of modern operating systems is the distinction between a program and the activity of executing a program. The former is a static set of directions, whereas the latter is a dynamic activity whose properties change as time progresses. (This distinction is analogous to a piece of sheet music, sitting inert in a book on the shelf, versus a musician performing that piece by taking actions that the sheet music describes.) The activity of exe-
cuting a program under the control of the operating system is known as a process.
Associated with a process is the current status of the activity, called the process state.
This state includes the current position in the program being executed (the value of the program counter) as well as the values in the other CPU registers and the associated memory cells. Roughly speaking, the process state is a snapshot of the machine at a particular time. At different times during the execution of a program (at different times in a process) different snapshots (different process states) will be observed.
Unlike a musician, who normally tries to play only one musical piece at a time, typical time-sharing/multitasking computers are running many processes, all competing for the computer’s resources. It is the task of the operating system to manage these processes so that each process has the resources (peripheral devices, space in main memory, access to files, and access to a CPU) that it needs, that independent processes do not interfere with one another, and that processes that need to exchange information are able to do so.
