Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 example would be from supervisor mode to protected mode. This is where the operating system performs actions like accessing hardware devices or the memory management unit. Generally the operating system provides a library that sits between the operating system and normal user programs. Usually it is a C library such as Glibc or Windows API ...
The classic Mac OS [a] (System Software) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The Macintosh operating system is credited with having popularized the graphical user interface concept. [32]
daemon: Operating systems often start daemons at boot time and serve the function of responding to network requests, hardware activity, or other programs by performing some task. Daemons can also configure hardware (like udevd on some Linux systems), run scheduled tasks (like cron), and perform a variety of other tasks.
Early operating systems were very diverse, with each vendor or customer producing one or more operating systems specific to their particular mainframe computer. Every operating system, even from the same vendor, could have radically different models of commands, operating procedures, and such facilities as debugging aids.
Operating systems are designed with one or the other of these two facilities, but not both. First, assume that a user process wishes to invoke a particular target system function. For the system call approach, the user process uses the trap instruction.
In operating systems, memory management is the function responsible for managing the computer's primary memory. [1]: 105–208 The memory management function keeps track of the status of each memory location, either allocated or free. It determines how memory is allocated among competing processes, deciding which gets memory, when they receive ...
The distributed operating system maintains this perception through the exposure of a single access mechanism for a system entity, regardless of that entity being local or remote to the user. Transparency dictates that any differences in methods of accessing any particular system entity—either local or remote—must be both invisible to, and ...