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
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