Sunday, April 18, 2010

Linux for Beginners (Lesson 2)

Functions of Kernel
The kernel provides basic services for all other parts of the operating system, typically including memory management, process management, file management and I/O (input/output) management (i.e., accessing the peripheral devices). These services are requested by other parts of the operating system or by application programs through a specified set of program interfaces referred to as system calls.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Linux for Beginners.

What is Linux? This is the first question which strikes us when we listen about it. Some will say, it is an operating system others will say it is just an open source platform, others will comment "I do'nt know what it is exactly but I listen a lot about it."
Linux is actually a kernel, Which came into existence due to the efforts of Linus Torvalds. Again a question what exactly a kernel is? Let's first find out what this thing called kernel is exactly.So our first lesson is to have a brief knowledge of kernel.
Kernel is the core of an operating system. This definition doesn't seem to express much about itself. When you want your computer to do some action for example to increase the volume with the help of your operating system, then you are invoking a hardware unknowingly. The application you are dealing with to increase the volume of your system can't directly interact with the corresponding hardware, it only requests a rich part of an operating system to do this favour for him and that part(called kernel) does it smartly. Actually kernel is a program written in a programming language which has the ability and power to interact with the hardware. Now I suppose we have some clear idea of kernel.