October 2000
Intermediate to advanced
704 pages
18h 13m
English
Content preview from Understanding the Linux Kernel
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Chapter 3. Processes
The concept of a process is fundamental to any multiprogramming operating system. A process is usually defined as an instance of a program in execution; thus, if 16 users are running vi at once, there are 16 separate processes (although they can share the same executable code). Processes are often called "tasks" in Linux source code.
In this chapter, we will first discuss static properties of processes and then describe how process switching is performed by the kernel. The last two sections investigate dynamic properties of processes, namely, how processes can be created and destroyed. This chapter also describes how Linux supports multithreaded applications: as mentioned in Chapter 1, it relies on so-called lightweight processes (LWP).
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