Question by s_ainapur: what are the differences between windows process management and Linux process management?

Best answer:

Answer by Mehmet Y
The differences are very great.

Windows process management is obscured, though in principle there is some similarities to Linux.
All processes have unique IDs, in the current Operating Systems, they also have user identification and group identification to go with the processes. Different processes can have different priorities.

In Windows, memory is managed by the system and metadata about processes is often stored in the registry. Applications must go through Windows process scheduling controlled by the kernel. Furthermore process management can be regulated by a Windows based architecture. Inside Windows in the guts are hives, which control hardware and regulate the system. These areas are obscure and only true experts understand the innards.

In Linux, life is a bit different. The fundamental Linux and Unix variants are built around is that everything is a “file”, so information on processes is available as well as many other things, presuming you have the appropriate rights. As the root owner of a machine, a person has complete and unadulterated control over the system. This means that while processing has a default, the root can always change that. Typically in a Linux distribution, server/system based processes have a default priority that is higher than a user run process.

In both windows and Linux, processes can become detatched from interfaces and run in the background. These processes in Linux are known as Daemons which run various processes such as ftp service, your graphical window system like KDE, etc. Windows has these sorts of processes, but they are generally called services. Redhat often interchanges the term service with daemons. In Linux, turning a software into a “service” can be performed by detatching the process from a terminal. Generally, these processes are administered through a user and/or group dedicated to the service. For example, a web service might be granted the user www-data and a group called www-data.

In Windows you can review the process and control them through the task manager. With the right permisions, you can change priorities, kill the processes and find out more information. In Linux, processes can be controlled through a command called ps (list processes), kill (kill a process by id), pkill (kill a process by name ) and nice (change the priority of a process where a lower number is higher priority). A similar text based program to task manager is top, which displays the heaviest loading processes (by memory and cpu load) for a particular process.

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