- Trending Categories
Data Structure
Networking
RDBMS
Operating System
Java
iOS
HTML
CSS
Android
Python
C Programming
C++
C#
MongoDB
MySQL
Javascript
PHP
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
Mathematics
English
Economics
Psychology
Social Studies
Fashion Studies
Legal Studies
- Selected Reading
- UPSC IAS Exams Notes
- Developer's Best Practices
- Questions and Answers
- Effective Resume Writing
- HR Interview Questions
- Computer Glossary
- Who is Who
What is the purpose of a process control block (PCB)?
Every process is represented in the operating system by a process control block also called a task control block.
A process control block (PSB) contains many pieces of information and it contains the attributes of a process.
Attributes of a process
The attributes of a process includes the following:
Process id
Every process is given some number. It may be either 16bit or 32 bit.
Program counter
It contains the next instruction that has to be executed.
Priority
Whenever a process is created, it is assigned with some priority. Processes which are having higher priority are executed first compared to processes which are having lower priority.
General purpose registers
Whenever you pre-empt and take the next process for execution, we should even make sure that the current state of the general purpose registers should be stored at some point so that when we come back again, the entire state of the general purpose registers are restored.
List of open files
We should know what the processes which open the files are. For a given file, what are the processes that opened it? For a given process what files it opened?
Because, whatever modifications we do on a file system it should be consistent. It reflects on the processes. We need to warn the other process which opened this file.
List of open devices −
These include printers and scanners.
Protection
The other processes should not get into your workspace and you should not get into other processes’ workspace.
PCBs are maintained in a linked list manner. By that we know how many processes are executing in a system and we can know the current status of the processes.
PCB gets updated while the process is executing. If a process is executing then that has to be read by the OS.
Process control block
Given below is the structure of the process control block (PCB) −
Process state |
---|
Process number |
Process counter |
Register |
Memory limits |
List of open files |
---------- |
- Related Articles
- What is Process Control Block (PCB)?
- What is a process control block?
- What happens to a PCB when the state of a process changes?
- What is the purpose of Process class in Java?
- What is the purpose of a register in a CPU and what are special purpose registers?
- What is the purpose of a constructor in java?
- What is the purpose of System Programs?
- What is the purpose of System Calls?
- What is the purpose of any research?
- What is the purpose of Human Life?
- What is the purpose of Risk Management?
- What is the Main Purpose of Blockchain?
- What is the purpose of the command interpreter?
- What is the purpose of the testng.xml file?
- What is the purpose of the .gitignore file?
