Process

NAME

process - Process abstraction

SYNOPSIS

A zircon process is an instance of a program in the traditional sense: a set of instructions which will be executed by one or more threads, along with a collection of resources.

DESCRIPTION

The process object is a container of the following resources:

• Handles
• Virtual Memory Address Regions
• Threads

In general, it is associated with code which it is executing until it is forcefully terminated or the program exits.

Processes are owned by jobs and allow an application that is composed by more than one process to be treated as a single entity, from the perspective of resource and permission limits, as well as lifetime control.

Lifetime

A process is created via zx_process_create() and its execution begins with zx_process_start().

The process stops execution when:

• the last thread is terminated or exits
• the process calls zx_process_exit()
• the parent job terminates the process
• the parent job is destroyed

The call to zx_process_start() cannot be issued twice. New threads cannot be added to a process that was started and then its last thread has exited.

SYSCALLS

• process_create - create a new process within a job
• process_read_memory - read from a process's address space
• process_start - cause a new process to start executing
• process_write_memory - write to a process's address space
• process_exit - exit the current process

• job_create - create a new job within a parent job

• vmar_map - Map memory into an address space range
• vmar_protect - Change permissions on an address space range
• vmar_unmap - Unmap memory from an address space range