Data Structures

As we touch on various aspects of the operating system, we will learn that the OS uses different data structures to accomplish tasks and solve problems. As a heads up, we briefly review some of these data structures here.

1. List: A data structure built up from nodes, each of which contains a data section and at least one address (or link) section. The data section stores some element (number, character, string, or even another object), and an address section contains the location in memory of the next (or previous) node.

   There exist different types of lists, including singly linked lists (each node points only to the next node), doubly linked lists (each node points both at the previous and the next node,) and circularly linked lists (the last node points back at the first node.)

   Some operations, such as accessing the nth element of a list, may require you to traverse the entire list (rather than accessing the particular element directly, as you would do when using an array.)