Cooperating Process

• Advantages of process cooperation
  –Information sharing
  –Computation speed-up
  –Modularity
  –Convenience
  
• Independent process cannot affect/be affected by the execution of another process, cooperating ones can
  
• Issues
  –Communication
  –Avoid processes getting into each other’s way
  –Ensure proper sequencing when there are dependencies
  
• Common paradigm: producer-consumer
  –unbounded-buffer - no practical limit on the size of the buffer
  –bounded-buffer - assumes fixed buffer size