Process Life Cycle

Processes are always started up by existing processes. The exception is process '0' (traditionally known as the swapper) that is launched into existence similar to how the universe was created - out of the blue.

A process may terminate whenever it wishes to. A process may also be terminated by other processes - provided they run under the same UID, or they run under the UID of 'root'.

A process carries with itself a set of attributes, including UID, virtual table map, file descriptors vector, etc.