Operating System Structures

Throughout their existence, operating systems have been evolving not only in their power and speed, but also in structural complexityand the variety of components:

  1. Monolithic Structure: At their dawn, OSs comprised a single binary file – the kernel – that executed all the OS functions. Mono means 'one' in Greek, and lithos means 'rock'.

    Despite such a structure being called 'simple', it is quite difficult to build a monolithic kernel that performs all sorts of OS services.

    Nonetheless, the advantage of such OSs is that they execute fast (since no time is spent on communication between the kernel and other OS programs – since only the kernel is present with the OS.

These notes by Miriam Briskman are licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 and based on sources.