Progress of a Process

In an operating system, the Process involves changing from one state to another state according to the specific condition such as the CPU, Input/output devices, and the user. There are some states available in the operating system such as new, waiting, ready, running, suspend ready or suspend wait. Progress can be seen through these process states to reach the destination. Progress of a process is one of the solutions to the critical section problem. The critical section affects the progress of a process when multiple processes are allowed in a system.

Progress of a Process in the Operating System

A Process in the operating system means the work executed by the Central Processing Unit and the progress of a process deals with the movement of a process towards the termination point.

States of Process

The different states available in the process are,

New state

In this state, The Process would be already created but not given to the main memory by the operating system.

Ready State

The Process is created and admitted to the main memory and would wait for the CPU for execution. Ready state process is maintained in a queue by CPU.

Running State

The process selected by the CPU is executed according to its instructions. It can have only one process in the running state at a time per CPU.

Waiting State

It is also known as a Blocked state and the state is waiting for some event to occur. The Waiting state does not require CPU and stays in the main memory.

Terminated State

It is also known as completed State which means the process is executed successfully. Then the Operating system will remove this completed state from the main memory.

There are two additional process states that occur in the operating system when the process switch from primary to secondary memory namely,

Suspend Ready State

The Process which was in ready state was swapped to main memory.

Suspend Wait State

It is also called suspend blocked state and the process was previously in waiting state but later swapped out of the main memory.

Effects of Progress of a Process in Operating System

The Effects of the progress of a process can be both positive and negative depending on the specific condition,

Efficiency

The Process is tracked to have increased efficiency and the quality of the process is also improved. For Example, technological progress can increase the production of goods and also services.

Rules of the Process

It improves the rules and enhances the fairness of the process.

Challenges

The positive effect of the progress of a process is that it creates new opportunities and also gives a negative effect while creating new processes.

Critical Section

The Critical section affects the Progress of a process by restricting the parallel access to shared resources. This section uses a piece of code where a process access or modifies the shared resource that can be used only once.

When the synchronization mechanism is not designed properly, it can lead to problems like deadlock, starvation, and priority inversion, which can prevent the progress of a process by blocking it from entering or exiting the critical section. It influences the progress of a process by requiring proper synchronization to avoid conflicts and ensure fairness among competing processes.

Synchronization problems in the Progress of a Process

These problems arise in the Progress of a process when all the processes need to coordinate with the shared resources that pave the way to the correctness and consistency of the process.

Deadlocks

A Deadlock is a problem in all multiple threads where many processes share the same resource. Progress of a process means that if a process is not using a resource, then it should not stop any other process from using it and that the decision of which process can use a resource next should not be postponed indefinitely. So, it reduces the deadlocks in the whole process.

Starvation

This problem arises when the process is delayed from entering or exiting the critical section because of an error in the scheduling process. After the occurrence of the problem, it has to wait for an indefinite amount of time for a resource to execute.

Priority Inversion

A circumstance in which a low-priority process is preventing a high-priority process from accessing a resource, which the high-priority process requires. Inversion of the priority order prohibits a process from moving forward by delaying the high-priority process unnecessarily.

Race Condition

A circumstance where a computation's result depends on the relative timing or order in which several processes that access or alter a shared resource are executed. Due to concurrent access to or change of a shared resource, a race condition hinders a process from moving forward by producing inaccurate or inconsistent results.

Conclusion

Progress of a process involves many numbers of effects like mutual exclusion property, priority process, and security threats like race condition vulnerability. The Process is executed via the several states of the system’s life cycle. When the process is executed in the critical section, it should provide a limited time to select the process, and if it is not selected within the time it will lead to deadlock.