Lifecycle of a process

With Linux version 7 just around the corner, I thought it would be interesting to trace process creation in as much painstaking detail as one weekend and 6 cups of coffee would allow. Namely, I want to answer the question of what exactly happens when we open a new browser tab or start our favorite video game. I’ll be focusing on processes spawned by other processes1 through libc, since the C standard library is about as close as we're going to get to the bedrock of the very universe. If you use CPython, this mechanism applies as well. We'll be taking the following journey together: I like to think of this as expanding on Thorsten Ball’s “Where did fork go?”. In his post, Thorsten gives insight into what happens when you fork a process. It’s a great read, you should check it out. The mechanism I’ll be describing also includes processes started by a programmer. Indeed, this is what most people see when they use a computer to create some application. However, under the hood there is alway