In: Electrical Engineering
What are the three main components of an operating system? And why?
Kernel: the kernel provides the most basic level of control over all of the computer's hardware devices. It manages memory access for programs in the RAM, it determines which programs get access to which hardware resources, it sets up or resets the CPU's operating states for optimal operation at all times, and it organizes the data with File Systems.
-Program execution: The operating system provides an interface between an application program and the computer hardware, so that an application program can interact with the hardware
-Interrupts: Interrupts are central to operating systems, as they provide an efficient way for the operating system to interact with and react to its environment. Interrupts provide a computer with a way of automatically saving local register contexts, and running specific code in response to events. Even very basic computers support hardware interrupts, and allow the programmer to specify code which may be run when that event takes place.
-Memory management
-Multitasking & Disk access and file systems
-Networking & Security
-Graphical user interface: Most of the modern computer systems support graphical user interfaces (GUI). Graphical user interfaces evolve over time. For example, Windows has modified its user interface almost every time a new major version of Windows is released, and the Mac OS GUI changed dramatically with the introduction of Mac OS X in 1999