Context Switching

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Saving and restoring the state (registers, program counter, memory mappings) of a process or thread so that execution can resume later. Context switches have CPU overhead and are more expensive between processes than between threads within the same process.

Key Properties

• State Save and Restore
• CPU Overhead
• TLB Flush

Related

• Process (cross-process switches are more expensive)
• Thread (thread switches are cheaper — shared address space)
• CPU Scheduling (scheduling decisions trigger context switches)

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operating-systems processes performance