My simplest analogy for people who are knowledgeable about computers is that it’s basically a giant driver.
Program wants to write to a CD? Instead of calling an obscure function in an undocumented hardware manual for every single disk ever, you let the kernel handle it by calling a well documented function that works on a lot of stuff it has drivers for.
The kernel will handle what programs want memory and will give it an address space where it can do it’s thing, and will handle what CPU cycles each program gets.
An operating system is basically a kernel that is meant to run and manage programs.
My simplest analogy for people who are knowledgeable about computers is that it’s basically a giant driver.
Program wants to write to a CD? Instead of calling an obscure function in an undocumented hardware manual for every single disk ever, you let the kernel handle it by calling a well documented function that works on a lot of stuff it has drivers for.
The kernel will handle what programs want memory and will give it an address space where it can do it’s thing, and will handle what CPU cycles each program gets.
An operating system is basically a kernel that is meant to run and manage programs.