Components and Architecture of Linux

Components of Linux System

Linux Operating System has primarily three components

•     Kernel − Kernel is the core part of Linux. It is responsible for all major activities of this operating system. It consists of various modules and it interacts directly with the underlying hardware. Kernel provides the required abstraction to hide low level hardware details to system or application programs.

•     System Library − System libraries are special functions or programs using which application programs or system utilities accesses Kernel's features. These libraries implement most of the functionalities of the operating system and do not requires kernel module's code access rights.

•     System Utility − System Utility programs are responsible to do specialized, individual level tasks.

 

 

Architecture

The following illustration shows the architecture of a Linux system –

The architecture of a Linux System consists of the following layers −

•    Hardware layer − Hardware consists of all peripheral devices (RAM/ HDD/ CPU etc).

•    Kernel − It is the core component of Operating System, interacts directly with hardware, provides low level services to upper layer components.

•    Shell − An interface to kernel, hiding complexity of kernel's functions from users. The shell takes commands from the user and executes kernel's functions.

•    Utilities − Utility programs that provide the user most of the functionalities of an operating systems.