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Execution in computer and software engineering is the process by which a computer or virtual machine interprets and acts on the instructions of a computer program.Each instruction of a program is a description of a particular action which must be carried out, in order for a specific problem to be solved.
In simpler CPUs, the instruction cycle is executed sequentially, each instruction being processed before the next one is started. In most modern CPUs, the instruction cycles are instead executed concurrently, and often in parallel, through an instruction pipeline: the next instruction starts being processed before the previous instruction has finished, which is possible because the cycle is ...
A computer program is a sequence or set [a] of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. It is one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. [1] A computer program in its human-readable form is called source code.
Program lifecycle phases are the stages a computer program undergoes, from initial creation to deployment and execution. The phases are edit time, compile time, link time, distribution time, installation time, load time, and run time. Lifecycle phases do not necessarily happen in a linear order, and they can be intertwined in various ways.
If, for example, it is a subroutine call instruction, execution is transferred to the subroutine, with the return location being the location after the execute instruction. However, some architectures implement variants of the execute instruction which inhibit branches. [1] The System/360 supports variable-length target instructions.
Depending on the OS, a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently. [1] [2] While a computer program is a passive collection of instructions typically stored in a file on disk, a process is the execution of those instructions after being loaded from the disk into memory. Several processes may ...
A process is a program in execution, and an integral part of any modern-day operating system (OS). The OS must allocate resources to processes, enable processes to share and exchange information, protect the resources of each process from other processes and enable synchronization among processes.
One way to attack a piece of software is to redirect the flow of execution of a program. A variety of control-flow integrity techniques, including stack canaries , buffer overflow protection , shadow stacks, and vtable pointer verification, are used to defend against these attacks.