The Operating System as an Abstraction - Essay Sample

Introduction

Operating systems provide an abstraction of the hardware (Anwar et al., 2016). As such, the OS delivers a standard interface to the services offered by the hardware. In this brief analysis, the author briefly analyses the various types of abstractions that are probable in the functioning of the memory, process, and file systems in the hardware/software duality. It is hypothesized that the abstraction layers protect the various hardware from undesirable properties and inconsistencies in the multiple elements.

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Process, Memory and File Abstractions

During process abstraction, the OS virtualizes the CPU by timesharing the CPU across multiple processes. The process is also referred to as a running program. During this process operation, the OS has a CPU scheduler which picks several active processes when you run an exe file. In creating a process, the OS allocates memory, opens basic files, and finally initializes registers in the CPU. The process abstraction provides an interface that separates the mechanism from policy. Process abstraction thereby acts to simplify application design by organizing information, adding new capabilities, and hiding undesirable properties (Hviid & Kjargaard, 2018).

Memory abstraction refers to the abstraction layer between program execution and memory. The abstraction layer handles the communication between the two systems in such a way that each of the two systems does not have to worry about what the other system does (Hviid & Kjargaard, 2018). As such, the operator does not need to worry about which memory address the memory is in, where the memory is stored, or when the memory shall be cleaned. Memory abstraction reduces the data inconsistencies that may occur in the main memory through when the programs directly access the physical memory. With file system abstraction, the operator can organize the data and manipulate them in different ways. The data may be classified into files and directories for portability and enhanced security. Only one pathway is defined for the various data files. The files are thereby traceable on the disk without having to manually instruct the controller in the hard drive to move the read head. The file system API can always issue an instruction to insert a byte range into a file (Hviid & Kjargaard, 2018).

Conclusion

The three forms of abstraction work together to protect the hardware services from inconsistencies during processing, file creation, memory, and execution. Data organization and memory abstraction allow the process abstraction component of the OS to pick and organize several active processes, mirror and virtualize the CPU and thus simplify the application design.

Bibliography

Anwar, F., D'Souza, S., Symington, A., Dongare, A., Rajkumar, R., Rowe, A., & Srivastava, M. (2016). Timeline: An Operating System Abstraction for Time-Aware Applications. 2016 IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS). https://doi.org/10.1109/rtss.2016.027

Hviid, J., & Kjargaard, M. B. (2018). Service Abstraction Layer for Building Operating Systems: Enabling portable applications and improving system resilience. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm). https://doi.org/10.1109/smartgridcomm.2018.8587543