Table of Contents
Process Management
Process is a program execution means when any program executes than it’s become a process. The operating system manages all the processes, which are given by the users, and also handled the system’s own process.
If two or more processes want to access the CPU at the same time than to which process the CPU would be allocated and for how long that would be taken care of by the operating system.
If you open the task manager then you will find out that many processes are running by you (user) in the computer system and also some background processes are also running. So this is the Operating system’s responsibility to manage all these resources. OS decides which processes allocate first to the CPU.
Memory Management (Main Memory Management)
Memory management is a particular concern with the main memory (RAM). If you want to execute any program in your computer then it must be allocated some space in the main memory, then it becomes a process. Now at the same time, many processes are running and all the processes are in main memory and as you know, the size of the main memory is always limited. So it is the responsibility of the operating system to decide which process would be there in the main memory and for how long. We cannot put all the processes at the same time into the main memory (RAM) because as I say, the size of the main memory is always limited.
Operating system manages the memory of the computer system means it allocate the memory to the process and also de-allocate the memory from the process.
File Management
While working on the computer, generally for users are required to manipulate various types of files like- opening a file, saving a file, deleting a file, etc. This is an important task, which is also performed by the operating system.
Resources Allocation
Resources can be- CPU, memory, I/O devices, etc. so the operating system allocates these resources to different processes.
In the multitasking environment, there are many processes executing at a time than it is the responsibility of the operating system to allocate the required resources to each process for its better utilization.
For this purpose, there are different types of algorithms are implemented such as- CPU scheduling, process scheduling, disk scheduling, etc.
Program Execution
Operating system provides an environment where the users can run programs easily.
All the programs are executed by the operating system like- WordPad, music, text editor, browsers, etc.
I/O Management
Input/output devices are- keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, etc. Operating system manages all the I/O devices and provides an environment between the system and the Input/Output devices. Device drivers are installed in the computer system that helps the operating system to interact with I/O devices in an efficient manner.
Secondary Storage Management
secondary storage consists of tapes, disks, and other media designed to information that will eventually be accessed in primary storage, ordinary divided into bytes or words consisting of a fixed number of bytes.
Error Detection
The main function of OS is to detect errors like- bad sectors on the hard disk, memory overflow, or errors related to I/O devices.
After detecting the errors operating system takes appropriate action for consistent computing.
OS provides security
OS provides security to users like- password protection. Many security features are in-build in the operating system.