Data Structures
Explore how operating systems use data structures to manage process states in virtualization. Understand process lists, control blocks, and how stopped, ready, running, and zombie states are tracked. This lesson explains the core components behind process management and context switching in OS virtualization.
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The OS is a program, and like any program, it has some key data structures that track various relevant pieces of information. To track the state of each process, for example, the OS likely will keep some kind of process list for all processes that are ready and some additional information to track which process is currently running. The OS must also track, in some way, blocked processes; when an I/O event completes, the OS should make sure to wake the correct process and ready it to run again.
Information of a process that the OS tracks
The snippet below shows what type of information an OS needs to track about each process in the ...