Operating Systems Concepts

Separation of Concerns

Three major categories of OS responsibility:

1) Process Management,

2) Memory Management

3) Storage Management

To manage and maintain the complexity of an Operating System, many vendors separate the OS concerns into smaller, replaceable components.

For each of these major categories of OS responsibility, you are to identify 1 components of independent, separate concerns, for a total of 3 components. For each of these 3 components, describe the components responsibility and provide an example of an implementation of that component.

For example, within the Memory Management component, separating the capability to translate logical addresses to physical addresses is one separate area of concern. This component is typically a hardware component (the MMU) manufactured to support a very specific architecture, such as the ARM Architecture (page 387) with 4-KB and 16-KB, or 1-MB and 16-MB pages for a 32-bit address. Fixing a bug, or upgrading the address translation algorithm version is confined to the MMU and the OS component, isolating this concern from other parts of the OS.