HP-UX 11i Internals

Chapter 9. The Process Life Cycle, Cradle to Grave

So far we have discussed the underlying PA-RISC hardware and many of the various kernel data structures that make up the HP-UX operating system. The point of view of our discussions has switched between that of the kernel and that of a process. We now have a broad enough perspective to examine the life cycle of a system process from cradle to grave.

We start with the birth of a process, which is the result of a system call to either fork() or vfork() and requires the establishment of a unique process table entry and the creation of the process's first thread. Then we examine the tasks performed by the kernel in the creation of the new process environment, including the creation of new memory ...