Introduction to Operating Systems, An operating system (OS) is the most important system software that manages all the activities of a computer. It acts as an interface between the user and the computer hardware, allowing users to interact with the system easily.
Introduction to Operating Systems
What is an operating system?
An operating system is a program which acts as an interface between the user and computer hardware. It provides an environment to run other program alos. Operating system controls everything so users and applications can work smoothly.
Any operating system has the following layer structure.
Functions of Operating System
The operating system (O/S) provides certain services to the programs and to the users. There are following three major types of services:
- Information Management
- Process Management
- Memory Management
1. Information Management
Information Management (IM) is the process of collecting, storing, organizing, and using information efficiently. It ensures that the right information is available to the right people at the right time. It also manages and organises the information in terms of directories and files, allocating and deallocating the sectors to various files. Some of the work of information system are –
- Create a file.
- Creating a directory
- Open a file (for reading, writing or both)
- Close a file
- Read data from file to buffer.
- Read and return the file status.
- Change working directory.
- Write data from buffer to file
2. Process Management
Process Management is a core function of an Operating System (OS). It deals with creating, scheduling, and terminating processes (programs in execution). The OS ensures that multiple processes run smoothly without interfering with each other. Some of the work managed by the process management are-
- Create a child process identical to the parent.
- Terminate a process
- Wait for a child process to terminate.
- Change the priority of the process
- Block the process
- Ready the process.
- Dispatch a process.
- Suspend a process.
3. Memory Management
The memory management helps to manage the memory and helps to allocate and deallocate the various processes. The operating system keeps a list of free momory location. Memory management also includes keeping track of how the memory is used, automatic cleanup of unused memory, and breaking memory into small parts for better use. The main techniques are:
Some of the system calls in this category are as follows:
- Allocate a chunk of memory to process
- Free a chunk of memory from a process
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