Chapter 7

Operating Systems Overview

An operating system provides multiplexed access to shared resources that include peripherals, CPU, and memory. Multitasking creates the illusion that many concurrent threads of execution are running on the processor when in reality the operating system kernel interleaves their execution on the basis of a scheduling policy. This is effectively time division multiplexing of the CPU. The operating system provides mechanisms to interact with services through an application interface. It provides process management (creation, deletion, and so on) and schedules the execution of the processes. It provides memory management, thread synchronization primitives, and time of day services.

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