Introduction of Operating System

 An operating system acts as an intermediary between the

user of a computer and computer hardware.
 The purpose of an operating system is to provide an
environment in which a user can execute programs
conveniently and efficiently.
 An operating system is software that manages computer
hardware. The hardware must provide appropriate
mechanisms to ensure the correct operation of the computer
system and to prevent user programs from interfering with
the proper operation of the system.
 A more common definition is that the operating system is the
one program running at all times on the computer (usually
called the kernel), with all else being application programs.
 An operating system is concerned with the allocation of
resources and services, such as memory, processors,
devices, and information.
 The operating system correspondingly includes programs to
manage these resources, such as a traffic controller, a
scheduler, a memory management module, I/O programs, and
a file system.

History of Operating System

The operating system has been evolving through the years. The
following table shows the history of OS.
Electronic Types of OS
Generation Year device used Devices

First 1945-55 Vacuum Tubes Plug Boards

Second 1955-65 Transistors Batch Systems

Integrated Multiprogrammin
Third 1965-80
Circuits(IC) g

Large Scale
Fourth Since 1980 PC
Integration

Characteristics of Operating Systems

Let us now discuss some of the important characteristic features of
operating systems:
  Device Management: The operating system keeps track
of all the devices. So, it is also called the Input/Output
controller that decides which process gets the device,
when, and for how much time.
 File Management: It allocates and de-allocates the
resources and also decides who gets the resource.
 Job Accounting: It keeps track of time and resources used
by various jobs or users.
 Error-detecting Aids: These contain methods that
include the production of dumps, traces, error messages,
and other debugging and error-detecting methods.
 Memory Management: It keeps track of the primary
memory, like what part of it is in use by whom, or what
part is not in use, etc. and It also allocates the memory
when a process or program requests it.
 Processor Management: It allocates the processor to a
process and then de-allocates the processor when it is no
longer required or the job is done.
 Control on System Performance: It records the delays
between the request for a service and the system.
 Security: It prevents unauthorized access to programs and
data using passwords or some kind of protection technique.
 Convenience: An OS makes a computer more convenient
to use.
 Efficiency: An OS allows the computer system resources
to be used efficiently.
 Ability to Evolve: An OS should be constructed in such a
way as to permit the effective development, testing, and
introduction of new system functions at the same time
without interfering with service.
 Throughput: An OS should be constructed so that It can
give maximum throughput (Number of tasks per unit time).

Functionalities of Operating System

 Resource Management: When parallel accessing
happens in the OS means when multiple users are
accessing the system the OS works as Resource Manager,
Its responsibility is to provide hardware to the user. It
decreases the load in the system.
 Process Management: It includes various tasks
like scheduling and termination of the process. It is
done with the help of CPU Scheduling algorithms.
  Storage Management: The file system mechanism used
for the management of the storage. NIFS, CIFS, CFS, NFS,
etc. are some file systems. All the data is stored in various
tracks of Hard disks that are all managed by the storage
manager. It included Hard Disk.
 Memory Management: Refers to the management of
primary memory. The operating system has to keep track of
how much memory has been used and by whom. It has to
decide which process needs memory space and how much.
OS also has to allocate and deallocate the memory space.
 Security/Privacy Management: Privacy is also provided
by the Operating system using passwords so that
unauthorized applications can’t access programs or data.
For example, Windows uses Kerberos authentication to
prevent unauthorized access to data.

The process operating system as User Interface:

1. User
2. System and application programs
3. Operating system
4. Hardware
Every general-purpose computer consists of hardware, an
operating system(s), system programs, and application programs.
The hardware consists of memory, CPU, ALU, I/O devices,
peripheral devices, and storage devices. The system program
consists of compilers, loaders, editors, OS, etc. The application
program consists of business programs and database programs.
Layered Design of Operating System

Purposes and Tasks of Operating Systems

Purposes of an Operating System

 It controls the allocation and use of the computing
System’s resources among the various user and tasks.
 It provides an interface between the computer hardware
and the programmer that simplifies and makes it feasible
for coding and debugging of application programs.
Tasks of an Operating System
1. Provides the facilities to create and modify programs and
data files using an editor.
2. Access to the compiler for translating the user program
from high-level language to machine language.
3. Provide a loader program to move the compiled program
code to the computer’s memory for execution.
4. Provide routines that handle the details of I/O
programming.

I/O System Management

The module that keeps track of the status of devices is called the
I/O traffic controller. Each I/O device has a device handler that
resides in a separate process associated with that device.
The I/O subsystem consists of
 A memory Management component that includes buffering
caching and spooling.
 A general device driver interface.
Drivers for Specific Hardware Devices

Below mentioned are the drivers which are required for a specific
Hardware Device. Here we discussed Assemblers, compilers, and
interpreters, loaders.

Assembler
The input to an assembler is an assembly language program. The
output is an object program plus information that enables the
loader to prepare the object program for execution. At one time,
the computer programmer had at his disposal a basic machine that
interpreted, through hardware, certain fundamental instructions.
He would program this computer by writing a series of ones and
Zeros (Machine language) and placing them into the memory of the
machine. Examples of assembly languages include

Compiler and Interpreter

The High-level languages– examples are C, C++, Java, Python, etc
(around 300+ famous high-level languages) are processed
by compilers and interpreters . A compiler is a program that accepts
a source program in a “high-level language “and produces machine
code in one go. Some of the compiled languages are FORTRAN,
COBOL, C, C++, Rust, and Go. An interpreter is a program that
does the same thing but converts high-level code to machine code
line-by-line and not all at once. Examples of interpreted languages
are :
Python
Perl

Loader
A Loader is a routine that loads an object program and prepares it
for execution. There are various loading schemes: absolute,
relocating, and direct-linking. In general, the loader must load,
relocate and link the object program. The loader is a program that
places programs into memory and prepares them for execution. In
a simple loading scheme, the assembler outputs the machine
language translation of a program on a secondary device and a
loader places it in the core. The loader places into memory the
machine language version of the user’s program and transfers
control to it. Since the loader program is much smaller than the
assembler, those make more core available to the user’s program.
Components of an Operating Systems
There are two basic components of an Operating System.
 Shell
 Kernel