Could you explain what context switching in operating systems means?

Context switching is the process where the operating system saves the state of the currently running process or thread and loads the state of another one to start or continue its execution. This is a key mechanism for multitasking, allowing efficient CPU utilization by switching between different tasks.

For example, the OS saves the CPU registers, program counter, and other information of the current process, then loads these data for the next process. This way, users and programs can work with multiple tasks simultaneously, even though the CPU physically executes only one task at a time.