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Unit 12: Processes and Threads in Windows
All in all, memory management is a highly complex subsystem with many data structures, Notes
algorithms, and heuristics. It attempts to be largely self tuning, but there are also many knobs
that administrators can tweak to affect system performance. A number of these knobs and the
associated counters can be viewed using tools in the various tool kits mentioned earlier. Probably
the most important thing to remember here is that memory management in real systems is a lot
more than just one simple paging algorithm like clock or aging.
Memory management is the act of managing computer memory. In its simpler
forms, this involves providing ways to allocate portions of memory to programs
at their request, and freeing it for reuse when no longer needed.
Self Assessment
Fill in the blanks:
5. The actual login dialog is handled by a separate program in ...................... .
6. In ...................... every user process has its own virtual address space.
7. The ...................... file is mapped into two address spaces at the same time.
8. Mapped page writer handles writes to ...................... files.
True or False:
9. Once order or data is mapped onto a page, the page is said to be a free page.
10. Windows 2000 support a single linear 4 GB demand-page address space per process.
12.4 Summary
• Every process starts with one thread, but newer ones can be created dynamically.
• A thread normally runs in user mode.
• Windows 2000 does not enforce any kind of parent-child or other hierarchy.
• Threads creation is simpler than process creation. Create threads has only six parameters.
• Socket is like pipes, except that they normally connect process on different machines.
• In implementation of process, a process created when another process makes the win32
create process call.
• When an MS-DOS program started, a normal Win32 process is started and loaded with
an MS-DOS emulation program.
12.5 Keywords
API: The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft’s core set of application programming
interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Boot Sector: A boot sector is a sector of a hard disk, floppy disk, or similar data storage device
that contains code for booting programs (usually, but not necessarily, operating systems) stored
in other parts of the disk.
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