OS Kernel can be referred to as the heart and brain of the OS, the kernel is the core program OS is based upon, the kernel resides in the memory of the hardware (HARD DISK) and is responsible for booting and spinning up the servers, the kernel is a bridge between the hardware and software components.
The kernel is responsible for controlling, monitoring, and operation of hardware devices. The kernel will have device drivers that are responsible for the integration of the hardware with the software system. The OS resource utilization is carried out by the kernel, be it hardware resources or virtual resources, all the major processors, and scheduled tasks that are responsible for the OS operations.
Kernel will manage processes like:
- Computing
- Storage
- Performance Management
- Boot
- System Updates
- Networking
- Inter-Process Communication
- i/o Mapping
- Peripheral Management
- Read / Write
- CPU/LU
- Service Integrations
The kernel Layer in OS is connected with the Hardware Layer : CPU | ALU | CU | RAM | ROM | MEMORY | I/O DEVICES
The critical code of the kernel is loaded into a separate area of memory called critical code, all the user-centric applications are stored in a separate area of memory, kernel critical code is responsible for the processor, memory, I/O ops, task scheduling, and other critical operations. Critical code is kept in kernel space.
Kernel main ops include:
- RAM management
- ROM Management
- I/O Device read/write ops
- Resource allocation and management
- Memory Management
- Device Management
- System Calls
- Interrupts Processing
- Inter-Process Communication
- Security and Protection
- Program Execution.
In early times of computation, the programs were directly loaded on bare metal devices, and no hardware or software level abstraction was used, the bare metal approach is not leveraged as widely as it was during the 1950s and 60s, but nowadays embedded system still utilize the same set of coding process. Modern-day computing is all about OS and kernels.
Diagrams
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