The Abstraction: The Process

• What is a process in the context of an operating system?
• How does an OS create the illusion of multiple CPUs when there may only be one physical CPU?
• What is time sharing, and how does it help in resource management?
• What is space sharing, and how does it differ from time sharing?
• What is a context switch, and why is it important?
• What are OS policies, and how do they influence system behavior?
• What is a scheduling policy, and how does it impact CPU utilization?

• What is a process's address space, and why is it important?
• Why are registers considered part of a process’s machine state?
• What is the role of the program counter (PC)?
• What is the role of the stack pointer and frame pointer?
• What are common process management APIs provided by modern OSes?
• What does it mean for a process to be loaded eagerly?