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Week 09 top 10 list of interesting OS things

1. What is a BIOS
   Short for Basic Input/Output System, the BIOS (pronounced bye-oss) is a ROM chip found on motherboards that allows you to access and set up your computer system at the most basic level. The website explains a lot of aspects on what exactly a BIOS is.

2. Systemd
   systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system.

3. Loader
   A loader is a major component of an operating system that ensures all necessary programs and libraries are loaded, which is essential during the startup phase of running a program.

4. Storage Array
   A storage array, also called a disk array, is a data storage system for block-based storage, file-based storage, or object storage. Rather than store data on a server, storage arrays use multiple drives in a collection capable of storing a huge amount of data, managed by a central management system.

5. Boot Block
   Basically for a computer to start running to get an instance when it is powered up or rebooted it need to have an initial program to run. And this initial program which is known as bootstrap need to be simple. It must initialize all aspects of the system, from CPU registers to device controllers and the contents of the main memory and then starts the operating system. To do this job the bootstrap program basically finds the operating system kernel on disk and then loads the kernel into memory and after this, it jumps to the initial address to begin the operating-system execution.

6. How to format a computer
   Need to learn how to format your computer? Formatting a drive prepares the surface of the disk to store new data. Computers are often formatted before they are sold, donated, or returned to employers. Likewise, computers with viruses or errors can be formatted and returned to their “out of the box” settings.

7. Network Attached Storage
   Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level storage architecture that makes stored data more accessible to networked devices. NAS is 1 of the 3 main storage architectures—along with storage area networks (SAN) and direct-attached storage (DAS). NAS gives networks a single access point for storage with built-in security, management, and fault tolerant capabilities.

8. What’s the Difference Between GPT and MBR When Partitioning a Drive?
   Two of the main schemes when partitioning a disk are GPT and MBR schemes, and this website does a great job in explaining what that exactly is.

9. RAID
   RAID, or “Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks” is a technique which makes use of a combination of multiple disks instead of using a single disk for increased performance, data redundancy or both. The term was coined by David Patterson, Garth A. Gibson, and Randy Katz at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987.

10. Firmware
    Firmware is a software program or set of instructions programmed on a hardware device. It provides the necessary instructions for how the device communicates with the other computer hardware.