Process Management and Process Migration

Introduction

In a conventional operating system, process management deals with mechanisms and policies for sharing the processor of the system among all processes. Similarly in a distributed operating system, the main goal of process management is to make the best possible use of the processing resources of the entire system by sharing them among all processes. Three important concepts are used in distributed operating systems to achieve this goal:
1. Processor allocation deals with the process of deciding which process should be assigned to which processor.
2. Process migration deals with the movement of a process from its current location to the processor to which it has been assigned.
3. Threads deals with fine-grained parallelism for better utilization of the processing capability of the system.

Process Migration

Process migration is the relocation of a process from its current location(the source node) to another node(the destination node). A process any be migrated either before it starti executing on its source node or during the course of its execution. The former is known as non-preemptive process migration and the latter is known as preemptive process migration. Preemptive process migration is costlier than non-preemptive process migration since the process environment must also accompany the process to its new node for an alredy executing process.
Process migration involves the following major steps:
1. Selection of a process that should be migrated
2. Selection of the distinction node to which the selected process should be migrated
3. Actual transfer of the selected process to the destination node.
The first two steps are taken care of by the process migration policy and the third step is taken care of by the process migration mechanism. The policies for the selection of a source node, a destination node and the process to be migrated on resource management.

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