List five services provided by an operating system Explain how each provides convenience to users Explain in which cases it would be impossible for user-level programs to provide these services?

Answer 1

1. List five services provided by an operating system. Explain how each provides convenience to the users. Explain also in which cases it would be impossible for user-level programs to provide these services.

Answer:

1. Program execution - the operating system will schedule on behalf of the user. This service could not be handled by the user because you need access to the hardware.

2. I/O operations - This makes it easy for users to access I/O streams. This means the user does not need to know the physical access of data in the machine. If there were not interface provided the user could not do this on their own.

3. File-system manipulation - This means the user does not need to worry about accessing and updating the file system table. Such access is best handled by the operating system because of this complexity.

4. Communications - in the case of memory mapping this is extremely beneficial for the OS to handle access and control to memory regions. The user could not in this case access such a system to share the map.

5. Error detection - If there is some error on one of the lower levels the user is notified so that they can take action. If there is no memory left on the heap for instance. The user could not do this because it is simply too much work for the user.