Thursday, 6 August 2020

What are the characteristics of Modern Operating Systems (OS)?

Characteristics of Modern Operating Systems:

 

The features like huge lines of code or a large number of unnecessary features are not only the good characteristics of operating system. In order to say that a particular OS is modern, we have to consider it’s designing concepts before in order to say that it is a modern operating system.

 

Modern operating systems have the following important characteristics:

 

1.    Object Oriented Design:

This is the current and latest trend in designing of operating systems in which the OS creates the object for each facility. Each object is defined using corresponding attributes and has a set of operations.

 

2.     Multithreading:

An application or a program is divided into a number of smaller tasks. These tasks are executed by the processor concurrently. These smaller tasks are called Threads.  A thread is a lightweight process or a dispatchable unit of work. A thread has some of the characteristics of the process but there are differences -Threads share the same memory space, processes don’t share the memory space.

 

Multithreading is the ability of a processor by which number of independent threads in an application are executed by the processor at a time. A notable example of multithreading is when we type a document in MS Word. The typed text is formatted, it is spell checked automatically to detect errors and the document can be saved automatically. All these individual tasks are called threads.

 

 

3.    Symmetric Multiprocessing:

 A computer having more than one processor is called a multiprocessor. In a multi processor computer, processes can share the memory and IO facilities. Further, these processes share the same job for execution. Such a system is called symmetric multiprocessor system.

 

An OS designed for symmetric processing is called symmetric multiprocessing operating system. The main function of OS is to schedule the jobs over the multiple processors. Symmetric multiprocessing has the following advantages over uni-processor architecture:

 

Improved Throughput:  throughput means number of jobs executed by the processor in a given time. As multiple processes can be executed, we get a better throughput.

 

Improved Reliability: even if one processor fails due to hardware problems, even then the jobs can be executed with the help of other processors. The performance of the system is affected (lowered) but the system withstands the complete failure.

 

Faster Execution:  from the user point of view, jobs are executed very fast.

 

 

4.    Distributed Operating System: 

 

Distributed operating system is an OS that runs on a network of computers. The OS, memory, files are shared by the number of users in the network from the server. For example 10 nodes are connected by server through LAN.  The OS, data files, RAM, processor slots are shared by 10 users from server. The user thinks that he is running on a single large system with one operating system. The users of a distributed system do not need to know where on the network their files reside.

 

 

5.    Microkernel architecture:

It’s a minimal kernel of an OS that performs only the essential functions.  The system processes perform all other OS functions. Note that, here the system processes means servers, and systems that contains the server are called client server model systems.


No comments:

Post a Comment