eolas/zk/Processes.md
2024-06-21 06:30:05 +01:00

620 B

id title tags created
t70u Processes
operating-systems
Friday, June 21, 2024

Processes

Programs are sequences of machine instructions stored in a file. However they do not work by themselves. Something needs to load the file's intructions into memory and direct the CPU to run the program. The OS does this via processes.

A process is a running instance of a given program. It can be thought of as a container in which a program runs. This container includes:

  • a copy of the program code loaded into memory
  • a memory address
  • other information about the state of the process