Explain PCB (Process Control Block). - Question & Answer Book

 Answer: - Process Control Block

·         The OS must know specific information about processes in order to manage, and control them and also to implement the process model, the OS maintains a table (an array of structures), called the process table, with one entry per process.

·         These entries are called Process Control Blocks (PCB) – also called task control blocks.

·         This entry contains information about the process ‘state, its program counter, stack pointer, memory allocation, the status of its open files, its accounting and scheduling information, and everything else about the process that must be saved when the process is switched from running to ready or blocked state so that it can be restarted later as if it had never been stopped.

·         Such information is usually grouped into two categories: Process state Information and Process Control Information. Including these:

Ø  Process state- The state may be new, ready, tunning, waiting, halted, and so on.

Ø  Program counter-The counter indicates the address of the next instruction to be executed for this process.

Ø  CPU-scheduling information- This information includes a process priority, pointers to scheduling queues, and any other scheduling parameters.

Ø  Memory-management information- This information may include such information as the value of the base and limit registers, the page tables, or the segment tables, depending on the memory system used by the OS.

Ø  Accounting information- This information includes the amount of CPU and real-time used, time limits, account numbers, job or process numbers, and so on.

Ø  I/O status information- This information includes the list of I/O devices allocated to the process, a list of open files, and so on.