The English word monolith literally means a large single upright block of stone:
Figure 5: Corinthian columns – they're monolithic!
On the Linux OS, applications run as independent entities called processes. A process may be single-threaded (original Unix) or multithreaded. Regardless, for now, we will consider the process as the unit of execution on Linux; a process is defined as an instance of a program in execution.
When a user-space process issues a library call, the library API, in turn, may or may not issue a system call. For example, issuing the atoi(3) API does not cause glibc to issue a system call as it does ...
