Operating System Short Paper: Kernel, Hardware, and Applications

This short paper explores the fundamental concepts of operating systems, focusing on the kernel's role in managing hardware, memory, and processes. The paper highlights how the kernel, a crucial component of the OS, interacts with hardware, manages memory allocation, and facilitates the execution of applications. It also touches on the resilience of operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Unix. Furthermore, the paper emphasizes the importance of running the kernel in a protected memory space to prevent crashes and ensure system stability. The paper also references two key articles discussing the express data path and the Tock Embedded Operating System, respectively.

Running head: OS SHORT PAPER
OS SHORT PAPER
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1OS SHORT PAPER
Operating System
Operating system is the interface among computer user as well as computer hardware. OS
is the software that performs every basic task like file management, handling input as well as
output, process management as well as memory management and peripheral devices such as
printers and disk drives. It is program which acts as interface among hardware and user and
controls execution of every type of program. Kernel is operating system’s special piece which
controls hardware, accesses data, runs applications, schedules processes, protects them and
allocates memory (Levy, et al., 2017). This is first program that is loaded on computer when
computer starts. Most crucial pieces of the code within kernel are loaded to memory’s protected
areas for other applications which are ruining in operating system could not overwrite them.
Kernel’s purpose is managing operating system’s deepest levels. This handles requests
from the hardware devices like keyboards, manages memory and files and schedules tasks. This
abstracts intricacies of operating system that is helpful for allowing application for printing
without the developers having any idea about certain printer models. Resilience of the old
kernels such as Linux, Windows and Unix might seem paradoxical to the industry (Høiland-
Jørgensen, et al., 2018). Computing, at lowest levels, is fundamentally same as this was several
years ago. It is essential to know operating system execute the kernel in restricted and protected
memory, known as kernel space, for preventing kernel from being terminated as well as crashing
the system. Through running applications from the kernel space, kernel resources could not be
tampered and cause system to crash.

2OS SHORT PAPER
References
Høiland-Jørgensen, T., Brouer, J. D., Borkmann, D., Fastabend, J., Herbert, T., Ahern, D., &
Miller, D. (2018, December). The express data path: Fast programmable packet
processing in the operating system kernel. In Proceedings of the 14th International
Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (pp. 54-66).
Levy, A. A., Giffin, D. B., Campbell, B., Leonard, S., Ghena, B., Pannuto, P., ... & Levis, P.
(2017, November). Demo Abstract: The Tock Embedded Operating System. In 15th
ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, SenSys 2017. Association for
Computing Machinery, Inc.