The Process

Introduction

The process is one of the most fundamental abstractions that the OS provides to users. A process is a running program.

• Address space
• Registers
  • program counter (PC)
  • OR instruction pointer (IP)
• Stack pointer

Process API

• Create
• Destroy
• Wait
• Miscellaneous Control
• Status

Loading A process

Process States

Data Structures

A process is just a struct!

Linux Process (struct task_struct)

Libraries

A process usually loads shared libraries as well as its own code. The Libraries notes cover dynamic and static linking, dependency types, and the Linux tools for inspecting them (ldd, nm, objdump, LD_PRELOAD, and ldconfig).