vitamin wrote: > > Processes don't use CPU, threads do. > > Process is just resource - memory, handles, etc. Thread is what actually being executed on a CPU. Each process has at least one thread. This might be true in some specific multithreading implementation you might have in mind, but it's not true in general and surely was not true for the original definition of a process, which lasted many years. From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_(computing): "a process is an instance of a computer program that is being sequentially executed". Multithreading only appeared, for practical purposes, 15-20 years ago or so, allowing one to really differentiate between a process and a thread. Before that everything was a process, which was _seen_ as a single thread of execution. It was still a process, though, being executed by the CPU. Furthermore, most initial implementations (e.g., C threads) were working at library level and the operating system was not even really aware of the internal process thread switching. Thus for the operating system, all it was being run was a process. As a matter of fact I wonder whether Linux implements multithreading at kernel level or library level. Getting off-topic anyway.
