Interview Q&A / Operating Systems
Operating Systems interview questions
Processes, threads, scheduling, memory and deadlocks, in plain words.
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- What is context switching in an operating system?
Context switching is when the OS pauses the process or thread running on a CPU, saves its state (registers, program counter, stack pointer) in its control block, and loads the saved state of another one so it can continue. It lets many programs share one CPU, but each switch is pure overhead.
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