MN404 Fundamentals of Operating Systems and Programming

This assignment assesses the following Unit Learning Outcomes; students should be able to demonstrate their achievements in them.

a.Describe the role of Operating Systems (OS) and its different subsystems in controlling computer hardware

b.Demonstrate competency in the use of a command line interface to operate and perform simple OS administration

The Operating system acts as an interface between the user and the computer hardware. Discuss in detail the roles of the OS as a resource manager and as an extended machine on the following systems:

Client,
Server, and
Mobile devices.

Students may consider any of the OS for discussions, for instance Windows, Linux, iOS, MacOS, Android, etc. Further, the students must consider any five of the following features relevant to the systems for discussions.

Answer:

Operating Systems

Client System: Windows OS

The primary features that are provided by the Windows OS are:

• Resource Sharing– The Windows OS provides the option to their users in order to share various forms of resources among different users. This would allow the user to log in to their systems at different times and thus share the resources of softwares [1].
• Security – The Windows OS provides a much higher level of security to their users. In order to implement such higher form of security patches within the devices, they have hence build up a Security Center that would be able to provide services based on firewall with the help of antivirus and Internet Security.
• Management of Users – The OS would help in supporting the users from a centralized located server. This would allow a single user for performing activities and thus be able to access resources at a fixed time.
• Management of Memory – The active applications and the OS kernel within the Windows OS would be able to share the memory space in between themselves. The OS makes use of Pools and System Page Tables in order to allocate equal amount of virtual physical-address for the various forms of kernel and applications [2].
• Conflicts within System Hardware – The Windows OS supports their users by providing a vast set of tools based on troubleshooting. They also help in providing various forms of mitigation tools in order to resolve the various kinds of conflicts within the shared resources based on hardware. The device manager supported by Windows OS would permit the user in order to browse throughout each of the processes.

Server System: LINUX

The servers based on LINUX kernel are mostly preferred than the other forms of operating systems based on server. The features provided by LINUX are:

• Security– The LINUX OS provides a much higher level of security to their users. They employ high form of efficient firewalls. High level of file access protocols are also employed by the OS in order to avoid any form of unwanted attacks due to viruses or unauthorized access to the system [3].
• Management of Users – The LINUX OS helps their multiple users to share the same amount of resources at the same point of time. The OS classifies their users based upon three categories such as Root, Super User or Normal User. The Root user has the prime access to each of the directories and files. Hence they are able to perform each of the functions. The Super user has the permissibility to add new users and thus be able to alter the permissions within different files. The Normal user has only the permission to read and write within the system domain.
• Allocation of Resource – A particular process is able to reference their bits of code within the process address space meant for a particular set of logical addresses. The LINUX OS takes care of the mapping of the logical addresses within the physical addresses during the processes of allocating memory to the various functions within the program [4].
• Efficiency and Stability – The servers within the LINUX OS are robust and thus they do not require any form of periodic form of reboots within the system. They also possess the capability to handle many number of users within their servers that would make it to be highly efficient.    
• Memory Management – The LINUX systems are able to detect when the memory would be needed to get freed. It would then be able to make some space available within the device.

Mobile Operating System: Android

Android is regarded as one of the most popular and globally used operating system. The basic features that are supported by Android are:

• Portability and Reliability– The Android Runtime employs the use of Dalvik Virtual Machine that would help to design the OS in a portable mode and thus would enhance the performance level of the programs [5].
• Management of Users – Android helps for the support facility of multiple users within a single device. The user accounts are generally classified as Guest and User Accounts. The guest user option helps in supporting a temporary information of such users. The general users helps the registered to sign in within the devices.
• Sharing of Resources – The Android OS helps the users for sharing a wide number of resources in order to grant any form of permission to those applications based on any form of content.  
• Security –The Android OS provides the grant of permission to any of the applications within the devices without the consent of the user. If any application would require a software update, then they would be able to automatically get updated. The OS also helps in supporting various level of security within the devices [6].
• Management of Memory –The Android OS makes use of memory mapping and paging techniques for management of system memory.  

Reference

[1] Dua, Rajdeep, A. Reddy Raja, and Dharmesh Kakadia. "Virtualization vs containerization to support paas." In Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 610-614. IEEE, 2014.

[2] Ligh, Michael Hale, Andrew Case, Jamie Levy, and Aaron Walters. The art of memory forensics: detecting malware and threats in windows, linux, and Mac memory. John Wiley & Sons, 2014.

[3] Reshetova, Elena, Janne Karhunen, Thomas Nyman, and N. Asokan. "Security of OS-level virtualization technologies." In Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems, pp. 77-93. Springer, Cham, 2014.

[4] Hussain, Hameed, Saif Ur Rehman Malik, Abdul Hameed, Samee Ullah Khan, Gage Bickler, Nasro Min-Allah, Muhammad Bilal Qureshi et al. "A survey on resource allocation in high performance distributed computing systems." Parallel Computing 39, no. 11 (2013): 709-736.

[5] Zhuang, Tiancheng, Paul Baskett, and Yi Shang. "Managing ad hoc networks of smartphones." International Journal of Information and Education Technology 3, no. 5 (2013): 540.

[6] Faruki, Parvez, Ammar Bharmal, Vijay Laxmi, Vijay Ganmoor, Manoj Singh Gaur, Mauro Conti, and Muttukrishnan Rajarajan. "Android security: a survey of issues, malware penetration, and defenses." IEEE communications surveys & tutorials 17, no. 2 (2015): 998-1022.