December 2000
Intermediate to advanced
816 pages
16h 57m
English
Computer programs are merely executables, binary (or otherwise), which reside on disk. They do not take on a life of their own until loaded into memory and invoked by the operating system. A process (sometimes called a heavyweight process) is a program in execution. Each process has its own address space, memory, a data stack, and other auxiliary data to keep track of execution. The operating system manages the execution of all processes on the system, dividing the time fairly between all processes. Processes can also fork or spawn new processes to perform other tasks, but each new process has its own memory, data stack, etc., and cannot generally share information unless interprocess ...
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