What Is An OS? An Essay On The Operating System.

This assignment assesses the following Unit Learning Outcomes; students should be able to demonstrate their achievements in them.
a.Describe the role of Operating Systems (OS) and its different subsystems in controlling computer hardware 
b.Demonstrate competency in the use of a command line interface to operate and perform simple OS administration

What is Operating System and its functions

The operating system is basically equipped with two functionalities. The first task that is performed by the OS is to provide a set of abstract for working with different resources that the application developer will require for the application development [1].  The next important thing that the OS performs is the management for the hardware resources. It provides the hardware resources when required.

When the user required to execute different services as the client, the OS is responsible for making the necessary abstraction that is required for executing the services. The process that is executed on the machine level specially that involves input and output is far too complex and user will not want to involve into this for getting the services done. The OS create the necessary abstraction on the client machine and provide such an interface to the user that the process becomes simpler for the user to follow [3]. Basically the OS create an extended version of the original machine or kind of virtual machine which is presented to the user for making the platform easy and intuitive so that the execution of the task becomes easier for the client.

The OS is actually responsible for performing the necessary abstraction within the context of the application program in the form of a top-down view approach. It helps to manage the resources that is required for the execution of the applications [4]. These resources contain processors, timers, memories, printers, disks and many other resources that is applicable for the applications or resources required for the specific functionalities of the application

While the OS is operated in this form of service it takes a different role in terms of services offered. When the OS is considered in the server side machine it is basically concerned with the allocation of serve to the client [5]. The OS in this context is responsible for providing a set of commands that is useful for performing a set of services. These services include the reading, writing, modification, saving and closing of files.

The primary feature of the OS that is run on the machine in the server side is to provide the necessary support to run various applications simultaneously. The processor with the OS helps to allocate time for execution of a particular program chosen by the user. The additional resources that is associated with the machine in the server side are processors, timers, memories, printers, disks and many other resources [7]. The operating system or the OS is responsible for proper management of memory along with the input output devices. This management becomes particularly important when more than one user is working on the same resources at the same time.

Functions of Operating System in Mobile Devices

The OS when considered for the mobile device, the main thing that it does is the abstraction of the computing environment that is running on the device for executing the functionalities that the user execute on the mobile device. The details like memory allocation, service interrupt are kept hidden and the users instead is greeted with an interface that helps to interact with the mobile devices and get the things done that matters to them. Hence the OS here can be considered as an extended machine on the mobile devices [2].

The OS in the mobile devices acts as the resources manager as well which helps to keep track of the applications and the programs that are being executed. Based on that, the OS allocates new resources of the executing of new program request which so that the execution of the already active program is not hampered and the new program request also gets necessary resources for the execution [9].

The android is provided by the Google. The OS is developed for the mobile devices, smartphones, and Smart television. There is no support for the PC. However the OS can be run with various emulator which mimics the mobile environment (Kaur and Sharma 2014). However there is no dedicated support for the PC.

The resources that is provided by the android is “static based content” and in addition to that additional files are also provided. These files contain the definition of the application layout, instructions which is based on the animation, bitmaps and the several other features that is required for the application development []. Android manage task of allocating the resources for different users and that too within the same android device. This works because the application data and the user account is separated properly and this is managed by the OS itself.

Android brings a range of options that helps to share files across the devices. User can opt for the inbuilt sharing options or the applications that support the file sharing options [12]. Along with the files user can even share the program file and game file. There are various option for storing files on the device. User can opt for storing the file on the device storage itself or in the cloud storage as well.

While solving the issues that arises due to the demand of resources, android introduces a concept called transparent computing. It makes the resources sharing facility centralized for ensuring that the resources sharing is fair and legal as well. The centralization of the resources includes the high level distribution of the OS as well. A virtual terminal is provided which contains the layer of the user interface. The terminal also manage the virtual resources which is particularly helpful for extending the co-operation that deals with the maintenance within the SRSM functionality. This functionality in terms deals with the proper allocation of the resources exactly the way the user need it [11].

The android provides an extensive interface for maintaining the memory and CPU performance. The task manager is responsible for this task (Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne 2014). It shows the different applications that is active in the background or the application which are currently running in the background. It also shows a detailed description of the memory used by the application that are active and opened by the user. The user then close the application of choices to free the memory. When the applications are it showed exactly how much memory is actually freed. Hence it can be said not only the memory management is efficient, it is intuitive too so that the user can follow it easily.

References  

1. Abolfazli, Saeid, Zohreh Sanaei, Abdullah Gani, Feng Xia, and Wei-Ming Lin. "Rmcc: Restful mobile cloud computing framework for exploiting adjacent service-based mobile cloudlets." In Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), 2014 IEEE 6th International Conference on, pp. 793-798. IEEE, 2014.
2. BBaccarelli, Enzo, Nicola Cordeschi, Alessandro Mei, Massimo Panella, Mohammad Shojafar, and Julinda Stefa. "Energy-efficient dynamic traffic offloading and reconfiguration of networked data centers for big data stream mobile computing: review, challenges, and a case study." IEEE Network30, no. 2 (2016): 54-61.
3. Banerjee, Abhijeet, Lee Kee Chong, Clément Ballabriga, and Abhik Roychoudhury. "Energypatch: Repairing resource leaks to improve energy-efficiency of android apps." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering44, no. 5 (2018): 470-490.
4. Cortez, E., Bonde, A., Muzio, A., Russinovich, M., Fontoura, M. and Bianchini, R., 2017, October. Resource central: Understanding and predicting workloads for improved resource management in large cloud platforms. In Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles(pp. 153-167). ACM.
5. Dai, Ting, Xiaolei Li, Behnaz Hassanshahi, Roland HC Yap, and Zhenkai Liang. "Roppdroid: Robust permission re-delegation prevention in android inter-component communication." Computers & Security68 (2017): 98-111.
6.  Chen, Haogang, Tej Chajed, Alex Konradi, Stephanie Wang, Atalay ?leri, Adam Chlipala, M. Frans Kaashoek, and Nickolai Zeldovich. "Verifying a high-performance crash-safe file system using a tree specification." In Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 270-286. ACM, 2017.
7. García-Valls, Marisol, and Christian Calva-Urrego. "Improving service time with a multicore aware middleware." In Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 1548-1553. ACM, 2017.
8. Kaur, Parmjit, and Sumit Sharma. "Google Android a mobile platform: A review." In Engineering and Computational Sciences (RAECS), 2014 Recent Advances in, pp. 1-5. IEEE, 2014.
9. Xie, Jing, Mao Miao, Fengyuan Ren, Wenxue Cheng, Ran Shu, and Tong Zhang. "Overload Detecting in High Performance Network I/O Frameworks." In High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 14th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 2nd International Conference on Data Science and Systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS), 2016 IEEE 18th International Conference on, pp. 999-1006. IEEE, 2016.
10. Silberschatz, Abraham, Peter Baer Galvin, and Greg Gagne. Operating system concepts essentials. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014.
11. Sun, He, Kun Sun, Yuewu Wang, Jiwu Jing, and Haining Wang. "Trustice: Hardware-assisted isolated computing environments on mobile devices." In Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2015 45th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on, pp. 367-378. IEEE, 2015.
12. ur Rehman, Atiq, Usman Ali Khan, Usama Sheikh, Madiha Sher, Munaza Razzaq, Syed Riaz-ul-Hassnain, and Syed Mohsin Matloob Bokhari. "Web & Android based file sharing, Hardware monitoring and control." In Emerging Technologies (ICET), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 1-5. IEEE, 2015.
13.