Functions of a Kernel

by Dan Trevor
(Kenya)

Managing the system's resources i.e. the communication between hardware and software components.

Usually as a basic component of an operating system, a kernel can provide the lowest-level abstraction layer for the resources (especially processors and I/O devices) that application software must control to perform its function.

It typically makes these facilities available to application processes through inter-process communication mechanisms and system calls.

Operating system tasks are done differently by different kernels, depending on their design and implementation.

While monolithic kernels will try to achieve these goals by executing all the operating system code in the same address space to increase the performance of the system, micro kernels run most of the operating system services in user space as servers, aiming to improve maintainability and modularity of the operating system.

A range of possibilities exists between these two extremes.