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Unit 1

The document discusses the kernel, its responsibilities, and components. It describes kernel space and user space, monolithic kernels, and benefits of microkernels. It also covers multitasking and context switching.

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Devika Kachhawaha
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41 views14 pages

Unit 1

The document discusses the kernel, its responsibilities, and components. It describes kernel space and user space, monolithic kernels, and benefits of microkernels. It also covers multitasking and context switching.

Uploaded by

Devika Kachhawaha
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Kernel:

 The kernel is the core of the operating system

 It is responsible for managing the system resources and the communication among the hardware
and other system services.

 Kernel acts as the abstraction layer between system resources and user applications

 Kernel contains a set of system libraries and services.

 For a general purpose OS, the kernel contains different services like

 Process Management

 Primary Memory Management

 File System management

 I/O System (Device) Management

 Secondary Storage Management

 Protection

 Time management

 Interrupt Handling

Kernel Space and User Space:

 The program code corresponding to the kernel applications/services are kept in a contiguous area
(OS dependent) of primary (working) memory and is protected from the un-authorized access by
user programs/applications

 The memory space at which the kernel code is located is known as ‘Kernel Space’.

 All user applications are loaded to a specific area of primary memory and this memory area is
referred as ‘User Space’

 The partitioning of memory into kernel and user space is purely Operating System dependent

 An operating system with virtual memory support, loads the user applications into its
corresponding virtual memory space with demand paging technique

 Most of the operating systems keep the kernel application code in main memory and it is not
swapped out into the secondary memory.

Monolithic Kernel:

 All kernel services run in the kernel space


 All kernel modules run within the same memory space under a single kernel thread

 The tight internal integration of kernel modules in monolithic kernel architecture allows the
effective utilization of the low-level features of the underlying system

 The major drawback of monolithic kernel is that any error or failure in any one of the kernel
modules leads to the crashing of the entire kernel application

 LINUX, SOLARIS, MS-DOS kernels are examples of monolithic kernel


Benefits of Microkernel:

1. Robustness: If a problem is encountered in any services in server can reconfigured and re-started
without the need for re-starting the entireOS.

2. Configurability: Any services , which run as ‘server’ application can be changed without need to
restart the whole system.
Multitasking:

Multitasking refers to the ability of an operating system to hold multiple processes in memory and
switch the processor (CPU) from executing one process to another process

 Multitasking involves ‘Context switching’, ‘Context saving’ and ‘Context retrieval’.

 Context switching refers to the switching of execution context from task to other

 When a task/process switching happens, the current context of execution should be saved to
(Context saving) retrieve it at a later point of time when the CPU executes the process, which is
interrupted currently due to execution switching

 During context switching, the context of the task to be executed is retrieved from the saved context
list. This is known as Context retrieval

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