The operating system helps in program execution by providing an environment for users to interact with hardware. Also, these include a number of services that are provided by the operating system. These services may differ from one operating system to another.
Operating System Services
The essential services provided by the operating system are –
Providing user interface
The operating system provides an interface through which the user governs the computer system and what to do. These interfaces are of different kinds such as a command line interface (CLI) in which the user enters the specific keywords called commands and another type of interface is a batch interface where the instructions are given by the medium of a file and are processed. The most easy-to-use and commonly used interface is Graphical User Interface (GUI) where a pointing device is used to access a particular option and a keyboard is used to enter the data.
Execution of Programs
The operating system is responsible for the execution of the programs loaded into primary memory. The program execution should be completed successfully or unsuccessfully by throwing of error.
Input/ Output Operation
The operating system helps in I/O operation. It helps in connecting with files or I/O devices connected to the system.
File System Manipulation
Programs running on the system need to access the files and directories available on the secondary memory. Apart from just accessing, many times they also need to perform operations such as read, write or search. This is called file system manipulation. A program can partially or fully use a file based on the permission it has.
Communication
Communication happens between the parts of the same process or between two different processes. These processes can share resources between two different systems or in the same system. Communication between two systems can happen through shared memory or through message passing. In message passing, the information is shared in the form of equally sized packets.
Error Detection and Handling
There are different types of errors occurring, which includes CPU error, memory hardware error such as power failure, programming error such as dividing by zero, or I/O device error such as an error in the external device or out of the page in case of a printer. So, it is the duty of the operating system to deal with different kinds of errors and throw errors accordingly. Also, for common error debugging and handling should be done.
Resource Allocation
There are multiple users working on a system. They may have independent processes that need resources. As the resources are limited, there is a need to share the resources. There are many resources some of which are special allocation resources such as memory, and file storage while others are general request resources such as normal files and I/O devices. So, it is the duty of the operating system to share the resources in the best way and there are CPU scheduling algorithms for that.
Accounting
There is a need to study statistics about different resources and the number of users using them so according to the system can be reconfigured for speed. So, it is the duty of the operating system to have an account of all these.
Protection and Security
Protection includes locking the permission so that other processes cannot access it. In a multi-user system, there are many different users and they want to have control over the information and allow only some processes to access these. So, it is the duty of the operating system to provide a security mechanism so that only authorized users with the user-id and password can access it. Also, while connecting to the internet through dial-up or modem it is highly required to have security to block unknown people from accessing vital resources.
So, in this article, we learned about the services that are provided by the operating system. Apart from all these, there are many other services that an operating system provides.
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