The architecture of a Linux system consists of the following elements:
- Hardware
- Kernel
- Shell
- Utilities
Hardware:
This is the physical hardware which consists of all peripheral devices like mouse, CPU, keyboard,network interface card.
Kernel:
Kernel is the core part of the operating system which interacts directly with the hardware, provides low-level services to upper layer components.
A few of the key responsibilities of a kernel are: process management, I/O management, CPU scheduling, memory management..
Shell:
It acts as an interface between user application and kernel. It provides access to kernel resources by use of a system call API.
Utilities:
It is a program that provides information about the operating system to users. A common example are: top(displaying system and memory utilization), grep, ssh, vi, date, which, history.
Note:
Linux is based on the UNIX architecture.
Diag-1: Linux Architecture

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- History of Linux Operating System
- Functions of Operating System
- Components of Operating System
Categories: Operating system (OS)
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