Continuing with process states and some scheduling mechanisms

In the previous section, we discussed to how initiate a new process. But what happens with it under the hood? As mentioned in Chapter 1, processes and threads are considered tasks in Linux’s scheduler. Their states are generic, and their understanding is important for correct procedure planning. A task, when expecting a resource, might have to wait or even stopped. We can affect this behavior through synchronization mechanisms as well, such as semaphores and mutexes, which we’ll discuss later in this chapter. We believe that understanding these fundamentals is crucial for system programmers as bad task state management can lead to unpredictability and overall system degradation. This is strongly observable in large-scale systems.

For now, let’s step aside for a bit and try to simplify the code’s goals – it needs to instruct the CPU to perform an operation and modify the data. Our task...