CST 334 Week 2

This week we learned a ton about the fundamental concepts of operating systems and its processing. I never thought of how CPU’s run but after this week I now do and now know how! We also learned about exec() calls and what happens when they pass or fail, and fork() calls and how the result is the creation of two processes. The first being the parent process, which initiated the fork, and then the second being the child process, which is a copy of the parent but with its own execution flow.

We also learned a lot about CPU scheduling. There are many ways such as First in first out, shortest job first, shortest remaining time to completion, and round robin. All of these are kind of self explanatory based on the name, FIFO being first one first, SJF being the shortest one gets done first, but round robin is an average. It kind of goes back and forth between the jobs to get them all done. I always thought the computer just did it in order, and did not know how big of a deal scheduling is and choosing the correct one. The choice of picking a scheduling algorithm impacts the turnaround time (how long a process takes to complete) and response time (how quickly a system reacts to user input). By being able to understand these concepts, it has given me more knowledge and now I know what is behind operating systems and the strategies they use to optimize the performance of the computer I use.