A Practical Guide to Operating Systems Principles
A Practical Guide to Operating Systems Principles An operating system (OS) sits between applications and hardware. It hides complexity, manages resources, and keeps systems safe. This guide explains core principles in plain language, with practical examples you can apply to real devices. You will see how choices about scheduling, memory, and I/O shape performance and reliability. Process management and CPU scheduling are central. The OS creates processes, assigns CPU time, and switches between tasks quickly. A process is a running program with its own state. Threads are smaller tasks inside a process. Context switching is how the OS swaps that state. Scheduling algorithms decide order: first-come, first-served; round-robin; or priority-based rules. In practice, systems balance fairness with throughput; interactive apps need low latency, while batch jobs favor predictability. ...