Hand Book of Operating Systems

An operating system is a type of system software that manages and controls the resources and computing capability of a computer or a computer network, and provides users a logical interface for accessing the physical computer to execute applications. This chapter describes typical architectures and generic functions of operating systems. Section 1 introduces the basic concept and brief history of operating system technologies. Section 2 describes the conceptual and typical commercial architectures of operating systems. Section 3 presents the common functions of operating systems, such as process and thread management, memory management, file system management, I/O system management, and network/communication management. Real-time operating systems are described in Section 4 with illustrations of the RTOS+ operating system.