Role of Operating Systems in daily life

Monday, January 14, 2013

Role of Operating Systems in daily life

We establish out about the role SW plays in a computing environment We learned to distinguish between SW belonging to the system & application categories Also discussed the different types of SW licenses:

Proprietary
Free
Open source
Shareware
Trialware

Main objectives of this article

What is role of the operating system in a computing environment
learn various functions that an operating system performs
The major components of an operating system
learn Various types of operating systems

Why Have OSes?

User/programmer convenience
Greater resource utilization

The basic Role of An OS

The 1st program that runs when a typical computer is turned ON, and the last one to finish running when the computer is turned OFF. It manages the HW and SW resources of the computer system, often invisibly. These include the processor, memory, disk drives, etc. It provides a simple, consistent way for applications to interact with the HW without having to know all the details of the HW.

Important Advantage for App. Developers.

Application developers do not need to know much about the HW while they are developing their app They just develop with a particular OS in mind. If the OS runs on many types of computers having different HW configurations, so will the app – without making any HW-specific modifications in the app SW. The OS hides the HW differences from the app.

Are OS’es Essential?

No. If a computer has been designed for limited functionality (e.g. it runs just a single program all the time as in a automatic clothes washing machine), it does not require a traditional OS In limited-functionality computers, an OS just adds to the overhead unnecessarily, which impedes the computer’s performance. In these situations, the required parts of the OS are integrated into the the only
program that is going to run.

Storage Management

The OS manages storage through one of its sub-modules, the File Manager A file system is a collection of directories, subdirectories, and files organized in a logical order. File manager maintains an index of the filenames & where they are located on the disk. File manager make it easy to find the required file in a logical and timely fashion.