14 docs tagged with "processes"

/proc is not a directory of files. Nothing under it is stored anywhere, and nothing you cat was

exec() is the complement to fork(), in the precise sense of doing the

fork()'s contract sounds absurd the moment you say it out loud: duplicate this entire process,

The kernel's unit of scheduling — not the two hundred fields, the twelve that matter, grouped by concern.

Every address a program uses is invented. 0x400000 in one process and 0x400000 in another refer to

A task's identity is not one number. There are four user IDs, four group IDs, a supplementary group

A process's exit status has to survive the process, because POSIX gives the parent the right to ask

One event, three instruments, and the point of running all three is not redundancy — it is

An operating system's job is to let multiple programs safely share one machine's hardware — CPU,

Every operating systems course spends a lecture on System V message queues and semaphores, and almost no

"Running" is the rarest state a task is in. Look at any real machine, at any moment, and almost every

A process is the OS's unit of isolation: a running program with its own private address space,

Signals are the oldest asynchronous notification mechanism in UNIX — older than threads, older than

Linux has no separate thread object: a thread is a task that shares its address space, files, and signal