Chapter 6: Process Management

This chapter explains the basics of process management and also introduces the basic synchronization operations and wait functions that will be important throughout the rest of the book.

Summary

Windows provides a straightforward mechanism for managing processes and synchronizing their execution. Examples have shown how to manage the parallel execution of multiple processes and how to obtain information about execution times. Windows does not maintain a parent-child relationship among processes, so the programmer must manage this information if it is required, although job objects provide a convenient way to group processes.

Looking Ahead

Threads, which are independent units of execution within a process, are described in the next chapter. Thread management is similar in some ways to process management, and there are exit codes, termination, and waiting on thread handles. To illustrate this similarity, grepMP (Program 6-1) is reimplemented with threads in Chapter 7's first example program.

Chapter 8 then introduces synchronization, which coordinates operation between threads in the same or different processes.