The Abstraction: A Process
In this lesson, you will learn about the different elements that constitute a process and elaborate on the part played by memory in a process.
We'll cover the following
The abstraction provided by the OS of a running program is something we will call a process. As we said above, a process is simply a running program; at any instant in time, we can summarize a process by taking an inventory of the different pieces of the system it accesses or affects during the course of its execution.
To understand what constitutes a process, we thus have to understand its machine state: what a program can read or update when it is running. At any given time, what parts of the machine are important to the execution of this program?
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