Saturday, January 19, 2013

An operating system called Linux

An operating system is a software program which provides 5 management functions:
  1. CPU
  2. Memory
  3. Networking
  4. Storage
  5. Device Input/Output

Linux if one were to draw a block diagram can be represented as:





In this diagram the core operating system is the Linux Kernel. The management functions which map to the generic definition of an operating system are:

  1. Process management
  2. Memory management
  3. Network
  4. File Systems
  5. Device Drivers

Applications viz. Firefox, vim, LibreOffice, Bash, etc .run in the User memory space and are not part of the Linux Kernel memory space. An application interfaces with the Linux Kernel through the system call interface.

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