Out:  Tuesday October 5
In:  Wednesday October 13 


Topic:  Processes, lightweight threads, and scheduling.

Silberschatz:  read chapters 4 (skip 4.6), 5, and 6

Problems:

1.  What is the biggest performance cost in context switching?

2.  What hardware/architecture support would you need to
make context switching "free"?   Explain how this support
would be used by the OS.

3.  What resources are required to create a process?  

4.  What resources are required to create a thread?  Why or how is
this different than process creation?

5.  What's the advantage of including kernel threads as well
as processes in an operating system?    

6. Why would you ever
want to have kernel processes, kernel threads, and user threads?

7.  Do problems 6.4 and 6.10 in the book.