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clone
A system call that creates a new process or thread, letting the child share chosen resources with its parent.
On Unix-like systems, clone is the low-level call for spawning a new unit of execution. What makes it flexible is that the caller picks which resources — memory, open files, signal handlers — the new task shares versus copies, so the same call can create either a full process or a lightweight thread. It is the primitive underneath higher-level process and thread creation.
See also
- context switchThe kernel saving one thread's full state and loading another's, so a single CPU can juggle many tasks.
- critical sectionA stretch of code that must be run by only one thread at a time to avoid corruption.