Tuesday, February 22, 2011

OS-LOADER

LOADER:

 A loader is the part of an operating system that is responsible for loading programs, one of the essential stages in the process of starting a program, it means loader is a program that places programs into memory and prepares them for execution. Loading a program involves reading the contents of executable file, the file containing the program text, into memory, and then carrying out other required preparatory tasks to prepare the executable for running. Once loading is complete, the operating system starts the program by passing control to the loaded program code.

LOADER is an operating system utility that copies programs from a storage device to main memory, where they can be executed. In addition to copying a program into main memory, the loader can also replace virtual addresses with physical addresses.
Most loaders are transparent, i.e., you cannot directly execute them, but the operating system uses them when necessary.

In a computer operating system , a loader is a component that locates a given program (which can be an application or, in some cases, part of the operating system itself) in offline storage (such as a hard disk ), loads it into main storage (in a personal computer, it's called random access memory ), and gives that program control of the computer (allows it to execute its instructions).
A program that is loaded may itself contain components that are not initially loaded into main storage, but can be loaded if and when their logic is needed. In a multitasking operating system, a program that is sometimes called a dispatcher juggles the computer processor's time among different tasks and calls the loader when a program associated with a task is not already in main storage. (By program here, we mean a binary file that is the result of a programming language compilation, linkage editing, or some other program preparation process.)




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