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Operating System
Hardware
Figure1.2: A general-purpose operating system
hijacking control of your car's computers? Although this might seem far fetched,
researchers recently demonstrated that they could remotely turn o a car's
braking system through a computer virus introduced into the car's computers
through a hacked car radio. A goal of this topic is to explain how to build more
reliable and secure computer systems in a variety of contexts.
For general-purpose systems, users interact with applications, applications
execute in an environment provided by the operating system, and the operating
system mediates access to the underlying hardware (Figure 1.2, and expanded
in Figure 1.3). What do we need from an operating system to be able to run a
group of programs? Operating systems have three roles:
Operating systems play referee | they manage shared resources between
different applications running on the same physical machine. For example,
an operating system can stop one program and start another. Operating
systems isolate different applications from each other, so that if there is
a bug in one application, it does not corrupt other applications running
on the same machine. The operating system must protect itself and other
applications from malicious computer viruses. And since the applications
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