Design Goals
In this lesson, you will get familiar with the design goals that have to be kept in mind while building an operating system.
We'll cover the following...
Requirements
So, now you have some idea of what an OS actually does: it takes physical resources, such as a CPU, memory, or disk, and virtualizes them. It handles tough and tricky issues related to concurrency. And it stores files persistently, thus making them safe over the long-term. Given that we want to build such a system, we want to have some goals in mind to help focus our design and implementation and make trade-offs as necessary; finding the right set of trade-offs is a key to building systems.
Abstractions
One of the most basic goals is to build up some abstractions in order to make the system convenient and easy to use. Abstractions are fundamental to everything we do in computer science. Abstraction makes it possible to write a large program by dividing it into small and understandable pieces, to write such a program in a high-level language like ...