13. Drivers and the Kernel
The kernel hides the system’s hardware underneath an abstract, high-level programming interface. It furnishes many of the facilities that users and user-level programs take for granted. For example, the kernel creates all the following concepts from lower-level hardware features:
• Processes (time-sharing, protected address spaces)
• Signals and semaphores
• Virtual memory (swapping, paging, mapping)
• The filesystem (files, directories, namespace)
• General input/output (specialty hardware, keyboard, mouse, USB)
• Interprocess communication (pipes and network connections)
The kernel incorporates device drivers that ...
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