Management Flashcards
What are operating systems?
a collection of programs that manages and controls a computer
Give 5 different operating systems
microsoft windows, mac os, ios, android, linux
What are peripherals? Give examples.
Input/output devices
[keyboards, monitors, printers, scanners and cameras]
How does the operating system manage peripherals?
Controls the sending and receiving of data
What do operating systems use to control peripherals?
Device drivers
What are device drivers?
Device drivers contain instructions on how to control a device. Each connected device has its own driver.
Give two advantages of using device drivers.
any device can be used with the operating system as long as a driver is available for it
drivers can be updated, usually to give better performance or to remove abug
Explain how the computer manages printing using spooling
organises data that wants to be printed into a queue
when printer is free the os releases the next data
users tasks and systems can continue during printing
Explain what backing store is.
secondary storage
usually a disk
Explain how the computer manages backing store.
ensures data can be stored and retrieved correctly from a disk
file systems like FAT are creates and maintained to organise data into a hierarchical structure
What does FAT allow?
copying/deleting modifying rename move search up restore after being delete
Explain how the OS manages memory (RAM)
Ensures that programs/data don’t corrupt each other
Ensures all programs and data incl itself is stored in correct memory locations
Ensures more than one program can run at the same time
Give a method of memory management and a brief explanation
Paging.
Memory is broken up into fixed-size blocks known as pages.
What is the page size for modern OS?
4 kilobytes(KB)
Explain how paging works
When a program is run it is loaded into memory.
The operating system determines how much memory the program requires and allocates enough pages to hold it and its documents.
When the program is closed the allocated pages are freed up for use by other programs.
Why doesn’t it matter that the pages a program occupies may or may not be continuous?
operating system knows how to access each page and fetches the data held in them when needed.
Give example of paging
Explain how OS manage processes.
Ensures that different processes can utilise the CPU and do not interfere with each other or crash
On a multi-tasking O/S ensure that all tasks appear to run simultaneously
Multi tasking is only possible if…
the OS can support multi tasking
the computer has enough memory to hold more than one program in primary storage at the same time
Give an example of a CLI/GUI of which can handle multitasking
Linux
Explain how the OS manages security
Allows:
individual users to be created and deleted
access levels to be given to users, such as administrator rights or standard user rights
auditing (keeping a log) of files a user creates, accesses, edits and deletes
