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Operating Systems (cont)

Operating systems (OSs)
  • provide an abstraction layer on top of hardware
  • i.e. same view available regardless of underlying hardware
Some characteristics of OSs
  • have privileged access to the raw machine
  • manage use of machine resources (CPU, disk, memory, etc.)
  • provide uniform interface to access machine-level operations
  • arrange for controlled execution of user programs
  • provide multi-tasking and (pseudo) parallelism