The Abstraction: A Process
Explore how operating systems abstract a running program as a process by understanding its machine state including memory, registers, and address space. Learn the distinction between policy and mechanism in OS design and how processes interact with persistent storage.
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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 ...