A Process and Its Threads

On HP-UX operating system releases prior to 10.10, the kernel scheduled a process to run on the hardware to accomplish its programmatic tasks. By this model, a process lived a very solitary life and the programmer did not have to be concerned with the coordination of access to the process's private system resources. While the kernel provided many forms of sharing between process views (shared memory, shared file access, memory-mapped files, and shared libraries to name but a few), process-private data could only be used or modified by the process's single thread of execution.

A process could only do one thing at a time. If it was blocking (or sleeping) on a physical action, such as waiting for operator input or a tape ...

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