This ability to continue providing service proportional to the level of surviving hardware is called graceful degradation.

System designed for graceful degradation are also called fault tolerant.

A thread is an independent strand that executes a program concurrently with other threads within the context of the same process.
It cannot run on its own ,it always runs within a process. store the same private address space of the process and they share all the resources acquired by the process.

A program by itself is not a process,a program is a passive entity,such as a content of a file shared in a disk,where as process is an activity entity.

The os is responsible for the following activities in connection with process management-

Creating and deleting both user and system process Suspending and resuming process Providing mechanism for process synchronization Providing mechanism for process communication Providing mechanism for deadlock handling

2-Main memory management It is a repository of quickly accessible data shared by the CPU and I/O device.

The OS is responsible for the following activities in connection with memory management: 1 -Keeping track of which parts of memory are currently being used and by whom, 2 -Deciding which processes (or parts thereof) and data to move into and out of memory, 3- Allocating and deallocating memory space as needed.

The OS is responsible for the following acivities : Creating and deleating files Creating and deleating directories Supporting primitives for manipulating files and directories Mapping file onto secondary storage Backing up files on secure storage media

I/O subsystem consist of : A memory management component that includes buffering, caching and spooling. A general device-driver interface. Drivers for specific hardware devices.

The processors in the system are connected through a communication network,which can be configured in a number of different ways. The network may be fully or partially connected.The connection network design must consider message routing and

connection.Strategies and the problem of contension and security. OS usually generalize network access as a form of file access,with the details of networking with the details of networking being contained in the network interface device driver

Many components are given to OS by control statements.When a new job is stored in a batch system or when a user logs onto time shared systems, a program that reads and interprets control statement is executed automatically

KERNEL The kernel is the protected part of an operating system that runs in kernel mode.It is the first layer of the operating system that was only the object and operation provided by the hardware.

Kernel is the control module of operating system. It is first loaded when the system is booting and remains in the memory intil the computer system is switched off.

1-Simple structure (monolithic) : Oldest approach Module of OS are not organized in a well defined manner A module can interact with any other module without restriction. OS does distinguish between user mode and system mode. It is difficult to enhance or maintain.

In the layered approach, the os is broken up into a number of layer (or levels),each built on the top of lower layer.The bottom layer is hardware (layer 0) ,the highest layer(layer n) is user interface. An operating system layer is an implementation of an abstract object that is the encapsulation of data,and of the operation that can manipulate those data. This approach simplifies debugging and system verification.

 Microkernel typically provide minimal process and memory management,in addition to a communication facility. The main function of microkernel is to provide a communication facility between the client program and the various services that are also running in user space System programs or user level programs ,implements outside the kernel,provide the remaining operating system services.This program is also known as server Communication is provided by message passing example- if a client program wished to access a file,it must interact with the file server. The client program and the services never interact directly.Rather they communicate messages with the microkernel.

Advantages 1. The benefit of microkernel approach include the case of extending the OS. 2. All new services are added to user space and consequently do not require modification of the kernel. 3. Microkernel OS is eeasier to port from one hardware design to another. 4. Microkernel provide more reliability and security beacause more services are running as user rather than kernel .If service fails the rest of OS remains untouched.

 system call provide the interface between a process and the OS Corresponding to each system call , there is a library function that user program can call.The procedure puts the parameter of the system call in a specified place,such as machine register & then issues a TRAP instruction in start the OS When it is finished the OS puts a status code in a register ,telling whether it succeeded or failed and executes a RETURN FROM TRAP instruction return control back to library procedure. The library procedure then returns to the caller in the usual way,returning the status code as function value.