In this post, the concept of Process is introduced.

Computer Hardware

There are many physical components composing computer hardware, but we will mainly focus on storage, memory, and processor.

• Storage permanently store the operating system, programs, and data. SSDs (Solid State Drives) and HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) are commonly used.
  • SSD : offers faster speeds but is more expensive and has relatively smaller capacity.
  • HDD : Slower but cheaper and suitable for large capacity storage.
• Memory (RAM) temporarily stores data needed for processing tasks. The larger the capacity, the more data can be processed quickly.
• Processor (CPU) acts as the brain of the computer, performing all computations and tasks. When we use programs stored in storage, the program is loaded into memory. Then CPU reads the program in memory and executes.

program & process

User commands such as ‘ls’, or ‘mkdir’ exists as file under /bin or /sbin directory. These files are stored in storage. It is called a program when it is stored in a file format. When we executes the program, it is loaded into memory. Programs that are loaded into memory and being processed by the CPU are called processes.