Process control block

The process table is a term used in computer science.

It is a table that contains an entry for each running process. This entry is called process control block ( process context, Eng. Process control block, task control block ). The process control block contains information about the state of the process, its program counter, CPU registers, its stack pointer and its memory usage and the status of its open files. Related Items on the record scheduling and management information and all information that must be saved when the process of "active" in the states " ready" or " blocked " passes to ensure a seamless continued operation after the interruption.

These interrupts are necessary for two reasons: on the one hand, the user wants a high degree of parallelism. On the other hand, the number of running programs (processes) is much larger than the number of available processors ( even with multi-core processors ). The process table is thus a well-maintained by the operating system data structure to perform run-time interruptions in processes can.

Under Linux, process control blocks are represented by the C struct task_struct.