UNIX Kernel--Process Management

UNIX Kernel - Process Management The UNIX system kernel is the master organizer of UNIX. The kernel schedules processes, allocates memory and disk storage, supervises the transmissions of data between the main storage and the peripheral devices, and honors the processes' requests for service. The traditional UNIX system kernel addresses three major tasks: process management; device management; and file management. These three areas remain central, but dramatic advances in hardware and software have expanded the …

…memory on modern computers is not large enough to store all the processes that are active in A UNIX system. The solution is to store some of the suspended processes on a disk. This is known as swapping. A process that is stored on disk must be reloaded into before it can resume execution. Paging is a similar process found on some UNIX systems, where infrequently used parts of processes are temporarily stored on disk.