Working with Processes in the Kernel
The BSD portion of the kernel provides a KPI for getting information about active processes in the system. Note that the term process is used in BSD as opposed to task, which is used in the Mach portion of the kernel, though they really refer to the same thing.
You have already seen examples of how to get information about a process in the AppWall example in Chapter 13, where we used the proc_selfname() function to get the process name of the currently running process. If the function is called in a thread owned by the kernel, the kernel process name “kernel_task” will be returned.
If you need to know the PID of the currently running process instead of its name, you can call proc_selfpid(). You can also find the name of a process if you know its PID by using the proc_name(int pid, char * buf, int size); function. An overview of functions in the process KPI is outlined in Table 17-1.
