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A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system intended for applications with fixed deadlines ( real-time computing ). Such applications include some small embedded systems, automobile engine controllers, industrial robots, spacecraft, industrial control, and some large-scale computing systems.
Kernel (operating system) An oversimplification of how a kernel connects application software to the hardware of a computer. The kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system and generally has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts ...
In computing, a shell is a computer program that exposes an operating system 's services to a human user or other programs. In general, operating system shells use either a command-line interface (CLI) or graphical user interface (GUI), depending on a computer's role and particular operation. It is named a shell because it is the outermost ...
A process control block ( PCB ), also sometimes called a process descriptor, is a data structure used by a computer operating system to store all the information about a process . When a process is created (initialized or installed), the operating system creates a corresponding process control block, which specifies and tracks the process state ...
The page table is a key component of virtual address translation that is necessary to access data in memory. The page table is set up by the computer's operating system, and may be read and written during the virtual address translation process by the memory management unit or by low-level system software or firmware.
The main purpose of memory protection is to prevent a process from accessing memory that has not been allocated to it. This prevents a bug or malware within a process from affecting other processes, or the operating system itself. Protection may encompass all accesses to a specified area of memory, write accesses, or attempts to execute the ...
Computer operating systems (OSes) provide a set of functions needed and used by most application programs on a computer, and the links needed to control and synchronize computer hardware. On the first computers, with no operating system, every program needed the full hardware specification to run correctly and perform standard tasks, and its ...
The article "Usage share of operating systems" provides a broader, and more general, comparison of operating systems that includes servers, mainframes and supercomputers . Because of the large number and variety of available Linux distributions, they are all grouped under a single entry; see comparison of Linux distributions for a detailed ...