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Measuring the cost of a context switch is a little trickier. The lmbench benchmark does so by running two processes on a single CPU, and
Measuring the cost of a context switch is a little trickier. The lmbench benchmark does so by running two processes on a single CPU, and setting up two UNIX pipes between them; a pipe is just one of many ways processes in a UNIX system can communicate with one another. The first process then issues a write to the first pipe, and waits for a read on the second; upon seeing the first process waiting for something to read from the second pipe, the OS puts the first process in the blocked state, and switches to the other process, which reads from the first pipe and then writes to the second. When the second process tries to read from the first pipe again, it blocks, and thus the back-and-forth cycle of communication continues. By measuring the cost of communicating like this repeatedly, lmbench can make a good estimate of the cost of a context switch. You can try to re-create something similar here, using pipes, or perhaps some other communication mechanism such as UNIX sockets. One difficulty in measuring context-switch cost arises in systems with more than one CPU; what you need to do on such a system is ensure that your context-switching processes are located on the same processor. Fortunately, most operating systems have calls to bind a process to a particular processor; on Linux, for example, the sched setaffinity() call is what you’re looking for. By ensuring both processes are on the same processor, you are making sure to measure the cost of the OS stopping one process and restoring another on the same CPU.Explain
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