Created Sunday 08 September 2013
A context switch is the process of storing and restoring the state (context) of a process so that execution can be resumed from the same point at a later time. This enables multiple processes to share a single CPU and is an essential feature of a multitasking operating system. What constitutes the context is determined by the processor and the operating system.
Context switches are usually computationally intensive, and much of the design of operating systems is to optimize the use of context switches. Switching from one process to another requires a certain amount of time for doing the administration - saving and loading registers and memory maps, updating various tables and lists etc.
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