4.1. Components of a process
A process consists of an address space and a set of data structures within the kernel. The address space is a set of memory pages[1] that the kernel has marked for the process’s use. It contains the code and libraries that the process is executing, the process’s variables, its stacks, and various extra information needed by the kernel while the process is running. Because Linux is a virtual memory system, there is no correlation between a page’s location within an address space and its location inside the machine’s physical memory or swap space.
The kernel’s internal data structures record various pieces of information about each process. Some of the more important of these are:
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The process’s address space ...
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