Preview
IB DP Computer Science — A1 Computer fundamentals — Operating systems and control systems | HL | A1.3.5
📋 What You Will Learn
- Explain how an operating system creates the illusion of many programs running at once on limited CPU cores
- Describe the process states (ready, running, blocked) and what a context switch saves and restores
- Explain the challenge of task scheduling and trace a round-robin time-slicing schedule
- Explain resource contention and trace a race condition (lost update) on shared data
- Define deadlock, state the four conditions that cause it, and outline how an OS deals with it
🍳 Why This Matters A single chef "cooking five dishes at once" is really switching between pans every few seconds, remembering exactly where each dish was left. If two dishes need the only whisk at the same time, one must wait — and if each chef in the kitchen grabs one of two tools and waits for the other, the kitchen freezes. That is multitasking, contention and deadlock in one picture.
What Multitasking Really Is
- A CPU core executes only one instruction stream at a