Operating Systems Must Be Extensible
Of importance is an operating system's ability to evolve
to meet new hardware and software demands:
- New hardware is constantly introduced - adding more memory presents
little difficulty; new types of disks, video cards, etc, are more
problematic.
- New application programs, tools, and system services are added.
- Fixes and patches are released to correct operating system
deficiencies.
All of this suggests that the operating system, as a program,
needs to be extensible - a modular design seems essential.
Consider the following figure:
A view of operating system services
Of course,
the above diagram provides a very simplified representation of operating
systems and their services.
In practice, the relationships between the modular components become very
complex -
Linux and
Windows-10
and the Interactive map of Linux kernel.
CITS2002 Systems Programming, Lecture 3, p4, 29th July 2024.
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CITS2002
