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context switch

   Also found in: Acronyms, Wikipedia 0.01 sec.
context switch [′kän‚text ‚swich]
(computer science)
The action of a central processing unit that suspends work on one process to work on another.

(operating system)context switch - When a multitasking operating system stops running one process and starts running another. Many operating systems implement concurrency by maintaining separate environments or "contexts" for each process. The amount of separation between processes, and the amount of information in a context, depends on the operating system but generally the OS should prevent processes interfering with each other, e.g. by modifying each other's memory.

A context switch can be as simple as changing the value of the program counter and stack pointer or it might involve resetting the MMU to make a different set of memory pages available.

In order to present the user with an impression of parallism, and to allow processes to respond quickly to external events, many systems will context switch tens or hundreds of times per second.


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By adopting the conceptions of parallel virtual machine, intelligent agents, lightweight threads and some considerations for high-performance computing, we may avoid mu ltiple copies of the same computation, reduce context switch, and prevent excessive swapping.
com), a leading embedded software tools developer, has added support for the ARM9 memory management unit (MMU) and fast context switch extension (FCSE) to its ARM[R] Development Suite.
In addition to these new graphical configuration capabilities, Developer's guest OS monitoring capabilities continue to provide graphical CPU utilization and OS context switch displays that are critical to understand and debug the real-time systems virtualized behavior.
 
 
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