Definition of a process: Running a program.
- Can be viewed as an abstraction of a running program provided by the OS.
- Can be summarized by taking inventory of the system it accesses or affects during the course of its execution
To understand a process, we have to understand its machine state: what can the program read or update when it is running? What parts of the machine are important to the execution of this program?
- Memory: Instructions and data sit in memory
- Address space – memory that the process can address
- Registers: Many instructions read/update registers, making them important to process execution
- Persistent storage devices – I/O information such as list of files the process has open