Operating Systems, Processes & Storage

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Abstractions about operating-system processes, memory, files, applications, communication, and recovery. They include background and real-time execution, process state, paging and resource leaks, inter-process interfaces, system images, virtual files and applications, logging, and data recovery.

18 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Background process — A computer process that performs work without occupying the user’s foreground interaction.
• Data Recovery — Retrieve and validate usable data from storage whose normal access path is unavailable because of deletion, corruption, metadata loss, device failure, or physical damage.
• Demand paging — A virtual-memory policy that loads a page into physical memory only after an attempted access faults on that absent page.
• Init — The first user-space process in a Unix-like system, conventionally process ID 1, which establishes the operating environment, launches and supervises services, adopts orphaned processes, and coordinates shutdown or state transitions.
• Inter-process communication — Operating-system and network mechanisms that let separate processes exchange data, synchronize actions or invoke services while preserving process isolation.
• Interface (computing) — A specified shared boundary through which hardware, software or human components exchange information and invoke services while hiding internal implementation.
• Log shipping — A warm-standby database strategy that repeatedly backs up transaction logs from a primary and restores them in order on a secondary server.
• Media Object Server — An XML-based broadcast protocol that coordinates newsroom systems with media servers and production devices through shared object, rundown, and status messages.
• Move (command) — A DOS-family shell command that relocates or renames files and directories subject to destination and overwrite rules.
• Object file — A compiler- or assembler-produced file containing relocatable machine code or bytecode plus symbols, relocation records, sections and metadata for linking or loading.
• Process state — A scheduler-relevant lifecycle condition of an operating-system process, such as new, ready, running, blocked, suspended, or terminated, together with permitted transitions.
• Real-time computing — Computing whose correctness depends on producing results within specified timing constraints as well as computing the right values.
• Resource leak — Fail to release an acquired finite computing resource after its logical lifetime, causing retained ownership, exhaustion, or degraded availability across repeated execution.
• Self-tuning — An adaptive control or computing architecture that measures its own performance, estimates how tunable parameters affect an objective and changes those parameters online to maintain or improve operation under changing conditions.
• System image — A serialized snapshot of enough computer-system state to restore the system or process to the captured condition.
• Unique set size — The portion of a process’s resident memory backed by pages private to that process and therefore expected to be reclaimed if it terminates.
• Virtual application — An application packaged with the minimal runtime environment needed to execute on virtual infrastructure while remaining isolated from the host installation.
• Virtual file system — An operating-system abstraction layer that presents a uniform file and directory interface over multiple concrete local, remote or synthetic file systems.