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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.
An operating system (OS) manages computer resources and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. An operating system processes system data and user input, and responds by allocating and managing tasks and internal system resources as a service to users and programs of the system.
MS-DOS (acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft.Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and some operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS" (which is also the generic acronym for disk operating system).
A multikernel operating system treats a multi-core machine as a network of independent cores, as if it were a distributed system. It does not assume shared memory but rather implements inter-process communications as message passing. [43] [44] Barrelfish was the first operating system to be described as a multikernel.
In computing, a desktop environment (IDE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell. The desktop environment was seen mostly on personal computers until the rise of mobile ...
The use of a high level language to implement the operating system, and the reliance on standardized interfaces was in contrast to the assembly language oriented approaches of the past. [1] As hardware vendors adapted Unix to their systems, new and useful features were added to Unix, e.g., fast file systems and tunable process schedulers . [ 1 ]
Use of a swap file or swap partition is a way for the operating system to provide more memory than is physically available by keeping portions of the primary memory in secondary storage. While multitasking and memory swapping are two completely unrelated techniques, they are very often used together, as swapping memory allows more tasks to be ...
The filesystem appears as one rooted tree of directories. [1] Instead of addressing separate volumes such as disk partitions, removable media, and network shares as separate trees (as done in DOS and Windows: each drive has a drive letter that denotes the root of its file system tree), such volumes can be mounted on a directory, causing the volume's file system tree to appear as that directory ...