Operating system assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Operating system - Assignment Example is a procedure that a computer’s Central Processing Unit (CPU) follows to change from one task/process to another while ensuring that the tasks do not conflict. For a computer to provide user-friendly multi-tasking, it needs an effective context switching. In a computer’s CPU, the term context is used to refer to the particular program counter and registers at a specific moment in time. A CPU’s current instruction is held by a register. The program counter Is also referred to as an instruction address register. It is a small amount of quick memory that is used to hold the address of the instruction to be executed immediately after the current one. It is possible to perform a context switch entirely in physical media, which is by use of hardware. This is especially so in older CPUs, for example the x86 series. In the modern world, the CPUs perform context switches by means of programming/software. The modern CPUs are very fast and they are able to perform numerous context switches within seconds. This gives the user an impression of the performance of multiple tasks by the computer. Deadlock prevention is the process of averting deadlocks by restraining how demands for resources can be made in the system and how they are handled, that is system design. Its main objective is to ascertain that at any moment one of the significant conditions for deadlock can certainly not hold. Deadlock avoidance, on the other hand, is where the system vigorously contemplates every request and decides whether it is safe to grant it at that point. The system requires additional apriori information regarding the overall potential use of each resource for each process. Deadlock avoidance allows more concurrence than deadlock prevention. The benefit of a multithreaded programming that is presented by multicore systems is that programmers are able to complete more total operations than with one core alone. This is the concept of multitasking. Instructions in a series are also able