OPERATING SYSTEM BASICS

The operating system acts as a bridge between the user applications/tasks and the
underlying system resources through a set of system functionalities and services. The OS
manages the system resources and makes them available to the user applications/tasks on
a need basis. A normal computing system is a collection of different I/O subsystems,
working, and storage memory.
The primary functions of an operating system is
 Make the system convenient to use
 Organise and manage the system resources efficiently and correctly

Kernel
Kernel acts as the abstraction layer between system resources and user applications.
Kernel contains a set of system libraries and services.
For a general purpose OS, the kernel contains different services for handling the following.
 Process Management deals with managing the processes/tasks. Includes setting
up the memory space for the process, loading the process’s code into the memory
space, allocating system resources, scheduling and managing the execution of the
process, setting up and managing the Process Control Block (PCB), Inter Process
Communication and synchronization, process termination/ deletion, etc .

 Primary Memory Management: refers to the volatile memory (RAM) where processes are
loaded and variables and shared data associated with each process are stored. The Memory
Management Unit (MMU) of the kernel is responsible for
 Keeping track of which part of the memory area is currently used by which process
 Allocating and De-allocating memory space on a need basis (Dynamic memory
allocation)
File System Management File is a collection of related information. A file could be a program
(source code or executable), text files, image files, word documents, audio/video files, etc. Each of
these files differs in the kind of information they hold and the way in which the information is
stored. The file operation is a useful service provided by the OS. The fi le system management
service of Kernel is responsible for

 The creation, deletion and alteration of files

I/O System (Device) Management Kernel is responsible for routing the I/O requests coming
from different user applications to the appropriate I/O devices of the system. In a well-
structured OS, the direct accessing

of I/O devices are not allowed and the access to them are provided through a set of Application
Programming Interfaces (APIs) exposed by the kernel. The kernel maintains a list of all the I/O
devices of the system. This list may be available in advance, at the time of building the kernel. Some
kernels, dynamically updates the list of available devices as and when a new device is installed (e.g.
Windows NT kernel keeps the list updated when a new plug ‘n’ play USB device is attached to the
system). The service ‘Device Manager’ (Name may vary across different OS kernels) of the kernel is
responsible for handling all I/O device related operations.

The kernel talks to the I/O device through a set of low-level systems calls, which are
implemented in a service, called device drivers. The device drivers are specific to a device or a
class of devices. The Device Manager is responsible for

 Loading and unloading of device drivers

Secondary Storage Management deals with managing the secondary storage memory
devices, if any, connected to the system which backup medium for programs and data since
the main memory is volatile. In most of the systems, the secondary storage is kept indisks
(Hard Disk).
The secondary storage management service of kernel deals with
 Disk storage allocation
 Disk scheduling (Time interval at which the disk is activated to backup data)
 Free Disk space management
Protection Systems Most of the modern operating systems are designed in such a way to
support multiple users with different levels of access permissions (e.g. Windows 10 with
user permissions like ‘Administrator’, ‘Standard’, ‘Restricted’, etc.). deals with
implementing the security policies to restrict the access to both user and system resources
by different applications or processes or users.
In multiuser supported operating systems, one user may not be allowed to view or modify
the whole/portions of another user’s data or profile details. In addition, some application
may not be granted with permission to make use of some of the system resources. This
kind of protection is provided by the protection services running within the kernel.

Interrupt Handler Kernel provides handler mechanism for all external/internal interrupts
generated by the system. These are some of the important services offered by the kernel of
an operating system. In addition to the components/services listed above, many operating
systems offer a number of add on system components/services to the kernel. Network
communication, network management, user-interface graphics, timer services (delays,
timeouts, etc.), error handler, database management, etc. are examples for such
components/services. Kernel exposes the interface to the various kernel
applications/services, hosted by kernel, to the user applications through a set of standard
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). User applications can avail these API calls to
access the various kernel application/services.