Process States and the Process State Graph

Processes

- a program in execution (simple definition)

- a process is an active entity, while a program is a static entity

Process States

- Each process may be in one of the following states:

- New: The process is being created

- Running: Instructions are being executed.

- Waiting: The process is waiting for some event to occur (such as an I/O completion)

- Ready: The process is ready to execute, but it must wait to be assigned to the processor

- Terminated: The process has finished execution.

Process State Graph

- The process state graph is a conceptual model of how a process can change states. It does not correspond directly to a data structure in the operating system.