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

Related Posts:

• Introduction to Operating System
• Types of Operating system
• History of Linux Operating System
• Functions of Operating System
• Components of Operating System

Categories: Operating system (OS)