8.3: The process life cycle

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When a process is created, the operating system allocates a data structure that contains information about the process, called a “process control block” or PCB. Among other things, the PCB keeps track of the process state, which is one of:

Running, if the process is currently running on a core.
Ready, if the process could be running, but isn’t, usually because there are more runnable processes than cores.
Blocked, if the process cannot run because it is waiting for a future event like network communication or a disk read.
Done, if the process has completed, but has exit status information that has not been read yet.

Here are the events that cause a process to transition from one state to another:

A process is created when the running program executes a system call like fork. At the end of the system call, the new process is usually ready. Then the scheduler might resume the original process (the “parent”) or start the new process (the “child”).
When a process is started or resumed by the scheduler, its state changes from ready to running.
When a process is interrupted and the scheduler chooses not to let it resume, its state changes from running to ready.
If a process executes a system call that cannot complete immediately, like a disk request, it becomes blocked and the scheduler usually chooses another process.
When an operation like a disk request completes, it causes an interrupt. The interrupt handler figures out which process was waiting for the request and switches its state from blocked to ready. Then the scheduler may or may not choose to resume the unblocked process.
When a process calls exit, the interrupt handler stores the exit code in the PCB and changes the process’s state to done.