Daemons

Depends on	Processes

In computing terms a “daemon” is not evil – in practice they are very helpful. “Daemon” is a Unix term: in Windows equivalent processes would be called “Windows Services”.

These are background processes which do helpful services and are not responsible to any user or user process. A nice (Unix) example is cron – which is a job scheduler which you can use to run other processes at regular intervals (such as making a file backup in the early morning, each day).

If you have access to a Unix terminal, run the top utility. It will reveal several daemons lurking in the machine, typically owned by root. It is conventional to end a daemon’s name with ‘d’, which makes them easier to identify.

You can find more details in the usual places.

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Also refer to:	Operating System Concepts, 10th Edition: Chapter 2.4, pages 74-75

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About this resource • Atomicity • Containers • Context • Context Switching • Daemons • Fork Unix • Hypervisor • Idle • Interprocess Communication • Multi Threading • Mutual exclusion • Pipes • Pointer Arithmetic • Process Control Block (PCB) • Process Priority • Process Scheduling • Process States • Processes • Queues • Queues Extra • Race Conditions • Real Time • Resources • Scheduler • Signal and Wait • Sleep • Starvation • Synchronisation • Thrashing • Threads • Unix Signals

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