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The operating system provides an interface between an application program and the computer hardware, so that an application program can interact with the hardware only by obeying rules and procedures programmed into the operating system. The operating system is also a set of services which simplify development and execution of application programs.
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.
The operating system holds most of this information about active processes in data structures called process control blocks. Any subset of the resources, typically at least the processor state, may be associated with each of the process' threads in operating systems that support threads or child processes.
Structure of monolithic and microkernel-based operating systems, respectively. In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS).
Example of a high-level systems architecture for a computer. A system architecture is the conceptual model that defines the structure, behavior, and views of a system. [1] An architecture description is a formal description and representation of a system, organized in a way that supports reasoning about the structures and behaviors of the system.
A process control block (PCB), also sometimes called a process descriptor, is a data structure used by a computer operating system to store all the information about a process. When a process is created (initialized or installed), the operating system creates a corresponding process control block, which specifies and tracks the process state (i ...
Modular operating systems such as OS-9 and most modern monolithic-kernel operating systems such as OpenVMS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, AIX, and Multics can dynamically load (and unload) executable kernel modules at runtime. This modularity of the operating system is at the binary (image) level and not at the architecture level.
The scheduler is an operating system module that selects the next jobs to be admitted into the system and the next process to run. Operating systems may feature up to three distinct scheduler types: a long-term scheduler (also known as an admission scheduler or high-level scheduler), a mid-term or medium-term scheduler, and a short-term scheduler.