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Operating System Concepts by Abraham Silberschatz and James Peterson is a classic textbook on operating systems. It is often called the "dinosaur book", as the first edition of the book had on the cover a number of dinosaurs labeled with various old operating systems. The bigger dinosaurs were labeled with the older big OSs.
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.
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components, to perform power management (e.g. putting unused hardware components to sleep), auto configuration (e.g. Plug and Play and hot swapping), and status monitoring.
Android is a partially open-source operating system closely based on Linux and has become the most widely used operating system by users, due to its popularity on smartphones and, to a lesser extent, embedded systems needing a GUI, such as "smart watches, automotive dashboards, airplane seatbacks, medical devices, and home appliances". [138]
The first-in, first-out (FIFO) page replacement algorithm is a low-overhead algorithm that requires little bookkeeping on the part of the operating system. The idea is obvious from the name – the operating system keeps track of all the pages in memory in a queue, with the most recent arrival at the back, and the oldest arrival in front.
The operating system keeps its processes separate and allocates the resources they need, so that they are less likely to interfere with each other and cause system failures (e.g., deadlock or thrashing). The operating system may also provide mechanisms for inter-process communication to enable processes to interact in safe and predictable ways.
When the computer system is executing on behalf of a user application, the system is in user mode. However, when a user application requests a service from the operating system (via a system call), the system must transition from user to kernel mode to fulfill the request. User mode avoids various catastrophic failures:
Dynamic loading was a common technique for IBM's operating systems for System/360 such as OS/360, particularly for I/O subroutines, and for COBOL and PL/I runtime libraries, and continues to be used in IBM's operating systems for z/Architecture, such as z/OS. As far as the application programmer is concerned, the loading is largely transparent ...