What are the main responsibilities of an operating system?

Answer 1

Some of the main responsibilities of an operating system include:

• Initializing a computer's hardware.
• Interaction with user and computer hardware as well.
• The time-sharing of different programs.
• Multitasking - running more than two programs at any given time.
• Multiprocessing as an operating system can deal with more than two programs at a time.
• Multi-threading.
• Error messaging between user and computer hardware.
• Configuring different types of hardware and keeping them in contact with each other.
• Configuring different types of software (i.e. Office, Peachtree) and keeping them in contact with each other.
• Managing and allocating different files and managing directories.
• Memory allocation and management. For example in the Linux operating system we can allow the memory to swap by doubling it to the real size of RAM.
• Memory allocation and management for main memory, cache and virtual memory.
• Managing networks and network devices.
• Deadlock avoidance.
• Handling real time scenarios.