What are the functions of a computer operating system

The functions of the computer operating system are: 1. Process management; 2. Memory management; 3. Disk and file system; 4. Network; 5. Security; 6. Internal communication security; 7. User interface; 8 ,driver.

The operating environment of this tutorial: Windows 7 system, Dell G3 computer.

Main functions of the operating system:

1. Process management

Both resident programs and applications run on a process basis. When the computer adopts the von Neumann architecture, each CPU can only run at most one process at a time.

2. Memory management

The memory management of the operating system provides functions such as finding available memory space, configuring and releasing memory space, and exchanging memory and low-speed storage packages. This feature is also called virtual memory management, and it greatly increases the amount of memory available to each process.

3. Disk and file system

The operating system has many types of built-in file systems. For example, Linux has a very wide range of built-in file systems, such as ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, GFS, GFS2, OCFS, OCFS2, NILFS and Google File System. Linux also supports non-native file systems such as XFS, JFS, FAT family, and NTFS.

4. Network

Many modern operating systems can operate the mainstream Internet communication protocol TCP/IP. This means that the operating system can enter the online world and share resources such as files, printers and scanners with other systems.

5. Security

The operating system provides direct or indirect external access to some resources, such as files on local disk drives, protected privileged system calls, users' private data and system The service provided by the running program.

6. Internal communication security

Internal information security can be seen as a means to prevent running programs from accessing system resources arbitrarily. Most operating systems allow normal programs to directly operate the computer's CPU, so there are questions like how to force a program to stop an operating system that can handle transactions and run the same special instructions, in which case the operating system is just another parallel program.

CPUs produced for general-purpose operating systems usually implement a certain degree of special instruction protection concepts at the hardware level. Programs with lower permission levels are often blocked from running special instructions, such as direct access to external devices such as hard drives.

7. User interface

Most operating systems today include a graphical user interface (GUI). Some older operating systems tightly integrate the graphical user interface with the kernel, such as the earliest implementations of Windows and MacOS.

8. Driver

Driver (Devicedriver) is a computer software designed to interact with hardware. It is usually a well-designed device interaction interface that provides information sorting and receiving functions for the device through a computer aggregation subsystem or communication subsystem connected to the hardware. And finally provide the message to the operating system or application.

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