How a Program Becomes a Process: Inside the meniOS Operating System

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A developer has detailed how their hobby operating system, meniOS, handles the transformation of a stored program into a running process. The project, which began as a basic kernel experiment, has grown to support user-space execution, a preemptive scheduler, virtual memory, a filesystem, and a shell. The article explains a fundamental OS concept: a program is static data on disk, while a process is an active instance of that program managed by the kernel. In meniOS, each process is tracked using a data structure called proc_info_t, which stores the process ID, execution state, CPU context, memory space, open files, and parent process reference. The write-up is framed as an accessible introduction to OS internals, using meniOS as a practical teaching tool.

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