Hardware configuration

To understand the relationship between an OS and the configuration settings and specifications of the hardware, you need to understand that, by nature, an OS is sleek, and hardware is klutzy. A large part of an OS job is to make the hardware appear sleeker than it may actually be.

In the sections that follow, we look at the OS, its parts, and a look at its relationship with hardware.

The primary parts of an OS

An operating system has three primary parts:

• Kernel: Modern operating systems are modular, meaning that most essential services, such as memory management, I/O handling, and CPU interactions, are in the module that loads at startup and remains in memory—the kernel. Other functions and utilities...