Operating System and its functionality | Operating System - EP01

Operating System and its functionality | Operating System - EP01

In this article, we are going to discuss the operating system and its functionalities. Operating System

The Operating System is system software and its basic functionality is that it works as an interface between user and hardware.

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Now, a question arises that what is the need for an operating system?

This is the most common question, that why we need an operating system if we do not use the operating system then to execute any operation or to perform any task we need to write a program so that hardware gets to know that user wants to perform this operation, but writing programs every time is not easy and not user friendly, this will also make the process of using the system more complex, to solve this problem operating system comes into play. So, we can say that the primary goal of an operating system is to provide convenience to the user.

There was a time when windows had acquired the 95% of the market; it was the most common operating system because its main focus was to provide convenience. But as time passed requirement increased and now we also want Throughput (throughput means the number of tasks executed per unit time) and in the case of throughput Linux performed best when directly compared to the windows operating system.

Due to this at present (at the time of writing this article) the share of windows in the market is 77.74%, while the share of Linux is 1-2%, there is another popular operating system macOS with 17.07% of the share.

  • The major functionalities of an operating system are :

-- Resource management.

-- Process management: We use various CPU scheduling algorithms for it.

-- Storage management: (Hard disk) It is done with the help of a file system.

-- Memory management: RAM

-- Security

  • Whenever the operating system performs a task, it performs that task through System calls.

  • Whenever we click on a file to open its operating system opens it with the help of an Open system call.

  • Open read-write are some common system calls.

This was an overview on the topic of Operating System and its functions, on a side note remember that Linux is the kernel, not an operating system, generally, we call operating systems like Ubuntu, Kali Linux, CentOS as a Linux operating system because they are built on top of the Linux kernel so do not get confused.

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