Courses/Computer Science/CPSC 457.W2012/Lecture Notes/Creation

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Process Creation

In this session, we will continue our examination of how processes come to be. We will start by considering what a process is (see task_struct). We will also briefly trace our understanding of control flow involving invoking parts of the system call interface.

We will also have a multi-perspective look at the routines

  • execve
  • fork / clone / vfork

involved in process creation. We will glance over the source code of the kernel's routines for creating (or cloning) a process and loading an executable (i.e., ELF) image into a process address space. They lead to a chain of procedures in the OS that is a bit deeper and more complex than the system call interface might otherwise imply.

Notes

Readings

  • MOS: Section 2.1: Processes (this should be partly review of what we've talked about in class)
  • MOS: Section 3.2.1: The Notion of an Address Space
  • MOS: Section 3.7 (all except 3.7.2) (this should review some of what we touched on in the previous class and lay some groundwork for talking about memory management)
  • MOS: Section 10.2.5 (Linux kernel structure)
  • MOS: Section 10.3.1 (about processes in Linux) should reinforce some class discussion

Reminder: Tomorrow is the last day to drop a class.