Overview of Projects and Tasks

The Oracle Solaris operating system uses the workload hierarchy to organize the work being performed on the system. A task is a collection of processes that represents a workload component. A project is a collection of tasks that represents an entire workload. At any given time, a process can be a component of only one task and one project. The relationships in the workload hierarchy are illustrated in the following figure.

Figure 2-1  Workload Hierarchy

A user who is a member of more than one project can run processes in multiple projects at the same time. All processes that are started by a process inherit the project and task created by the parent process. When you switch to a new project in a startup script, all child processes run in the new project.

An executing user process has an associated user identity (uid), group identity (gid), and project identity (projid). Process attributes and abilities are inherited from the user, group, and project identities to form the execution context for a task.

For an in-depth discussion of projects and tasks, see Chapter 2, About Projects and Tasks, in Administering Resource Management in Oracle Solaris 11.2 . For the administration commands for managing projects and tasks, see Chapter 3, Administering Projects and Tasks, in Administering Resource Management in Oracle Solaris 11.2 .