Process Execution

We are now ready to talk about the software systems consisting of more than one process in their overall architecture. These systems are usually called multi-process or multiple-process systems. This chapter, together with the next chapter, is trying to cover the concepts of multi-processing and conduct a pros-and-cons analysis in order to compare it with multithreading, which we covered in Chapter 15, Thread Execution, and Chapter 16, Thread Synchronization.

In this chapter, our focus is the available APIs and techniques to start a new process and how process execution actually happens, and in the next chapter, we'll go through concurrent environments consisting of more than one process. We are going to explain how various states can be shared among a number of processes and what common ways of accessing shared state in a multi-processing environment are.

A proportion of this chapter is based on comparing multi-processing and multithreading...