Processes overview

Processes vs Threads

Threads are seen as a normal process in the Linux Kernel, just that they share memory regions with other processes

Each thread has its own program counter, process stack and process registers

A program has processes.

A processes has threads.

Creating processes

A process is created by calling the fork() system call

fork() duplicates an existing process, the resulting duplicate is its child

Often, after fork() is called to duplicate the process, exec() is called which creates a new address space and loads a new program into it.