Process Management
Core concepts of process and thread management.
The vocabulary of process and thread management: processes, threads, control blocks, context switches, fork and exec, and the zombie and orphan states, plus process states, inter-process communication primitives and daemons.
Use it when
- You need the precise meaning of a process term for debugging or teaching.
- You are choosing between threads, processes and IPC mechanisms.
Watch out for
- Linux, Windows and macOS implement these ideas differently; fork and exec are the Unix model, while Windows creates processes with a single call.
- Zombie processes are already dead; they cannot be killed, only reaped by their parent.
The data
16 rows
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Process | An instance of a program in execution with its own address space. |
| Thread | A single flow of control within a process sharing its resources. |
| Process Control Block | Data structure storing process state, registers, and scheduling info. |
| Context Switch | Saving and restoring CPU state when switching between processes. |
| Fork | System call creating a child process as a copy of the parent. |
| Exec | System call replacing the current process image with a new program. |
| Zombie Process | A terminated process whose exit status has not been collected. |
| Orphan Process | A process whose parent has terminated before it. |
| Process States | The lifecycle states of a process: new, ready, running, waiting (blocked) and terminated. |
| Inter-Process Communication | Mechanisms for processes to exchange data, such as pipes, sockets, shared memory and message queues. |
| Pipe | A one-way byte channel between processes, the basis of shell command chains. |
| Signal | An asynchronous notification delivered to a process, such as SIGTERM to ask it to exit. |
| Semaphore | A counter used to control access to a shared resource by multiple processes or threads. |
| Mutex | A lock that allows one thread at a time to hold it, used to protect critical sections. |
| Daemon | A long-running background process, usually started at boot and detached from a terminal. |
| Scheduler | The kernel component that decides which ready process or thread runs next. |
Fields
The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.
| Section | Field | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| data | term | string | Process |
| data | description | string | An instance of a program in execution with its … |
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