Processes & IPC

A process is a bounded registry entry owning an image, an address space, a lifecycle state, and an exit status. Several processes run concurrently and exchange bytes through kernel mailboxes.

Lifecycle

running → exited → zombie → reaped. The scheduler's idle task reaps one zombie per iteration, the exited descriptor stays visible in procs with its status kept, and the allocator pages return at the reap.

• exec <file> [args...] loads and spawns; capacity is bounded (16-slot pool: shell + worker + thirteen EL0 slots + idle).
• kill <pid|name> force-terminates with status 137 — the kernel owns lifetime, not the program.
• procs prints the table; tasks prints scheduler slots and states.

IPC

• Mailbox — sys_ipc_send copies the caller's bytes into the target's ring (full → ENOSPC); sys_ipc_recv copies the caller's own ring out (peek → copy → drop, so a bad buffer never loses a message).
• Wait — sys_wait(target) blocks the caller until the target exits and returns its status; event-driven, not POSIX.
• Observability — sys_procs gives EL0 a read-only snapshot of the process table.

What's proven live

• Concurrency — live-concurrent shows two live processes.
• Long-lived peers — live-long-lived keeps one program running across another's exit, reap, and re-exec.
• IPC round trip — live-ipc interleaves ipc: ping N sends with byte-exact peer: got ping N echoes.
• Wait — live-wait shows two blocked tasks while the target is still running, then the status propagates.
• Scale — live-scale runs ten user programs at once inside the 16-slot pool (thirteen EL0 user slots after M65d / #1442).