Hardware and Software Flashcards
Give examples of operating systems
Windows, MacOS, Linux
What is an operating system
A program or set of programs that manage the operations of the computer for the user
How do operating systems hide the complexity of the computer
They use APIs (Application Programming Interface) to bridge the gap between user and hardware
Where is the operating system stored?
Hard Drive
How is the operating system launched
It is launched by a loader program in the ROM
Give examples of operating system tasks
Processor Scheduling, File Management, Interrupt Handling, Memory Management, I/O Management
What is memory management
Where the operating system allocates RAM storage to applications
What is virtual memory
Where the RAM is full and storage is instead allocated to the Hard Disk rather than the RAM to deal with space
What is processor scheduling
The operating system uses a scheduler to fairly allocate processing power to each program
What are the objectives of a scheduler
- Maximise throughput
- Provide acceptable response times
- Ensure hardware resources are kept as busy as possible
- To get all the small jobs done first
What is interrupt handling
When a new request is received for the processor it stops what it is doing to handle the request and performs an ISR (Interrupt service routine)
What is I/O Management
Where the OS provides an interface for the peripherals and internal hardware to ‘talk’ to and interact with the software
What is multi-threading
Where a program is split into multiple threads and sent to different cores of a processor
What is context switching
Process of storing the state of a process or the process of a thread
