An operating system is intimately tied to the hardware of the computer it runs on. It extends the computer’s instruction set and manages its resources. To work it must know a great deal about the hardware, at least, about how the hardware appears to the programmer.
Conceptually, a simple personal computer can be abstracted to a model resembling that of Fig. 1-5. The CPU, memory, and I/O devices are all connected by a system bus and communicate with one another over it. Modern personal computers have a more complicated structure, involving multiple buses, which we will look at later. For the time being, this model will be sufficient. In the following sections, we will briefly review these components and examine some of the hardware issues that are of concern to operating system designers.
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