Week 27 (Week 2 of CST334)

 This week we learned about Processes, Process management, and process scheduling. A lot of this fed into the topics of the previous week, which I appreciated since I had something to follow along and build upon. 
We learned the difference between a program and a process (which reflects a current state, and can have multiple copies of the process running at once). We then learned the operating systems' process management practices, and that there are three main states for a process: ready, running, and blocked. This merged with the concept we were introduced to last week--virtualization, and how this ties into the concept, or perhaps illusion, of multi-programming. In reality, there is only one process running at a given time for a CPU, so while we may have many different programs running at the same time, only one is pulling on the CPU at a given time. And this priority/order (or schedule) has it's own system that we learned about as well.

This was ironically one of my favorite topics, because I enjoyed working on the practice problems on the quiz. It's ironic, though, because I did not do as well as I thought I would. This is perhaps something I need to see another tutorial of online. However, I ran out of time to improve my quiz score, and needed to move on.

The next module is called memory virtualization, which I assume is going to be related to how the OS allocates memory, while giving the illusion that a given program or process actually has access to all of the memory. Or maybe it is cut off from the already allocated memory, but is unaware of it?

This is all SLIGHTLY familiar to me from the computer architecture class I took, but is a bit more elaborate (and thankfully not so reliant on assembly code).