A supervisory program or supervisor is a
computer program, usually part of an
operating system, that controls the execution of other
routines and regulates
work scheduling,
input/output operations,
error actions, and similar functions and regulates the flow of work in a
data processing
Data processing is the collection and manipulation of digital data to produce meaningful information.
Data processing is a form of ''information processing'', which is the modification (processing) of information in any manner detectable by a ...
system.
It can also refer to a program that allocates computer component space and schedules computer events by
task queuing and system
interrupts. Control of the system is returned to the supervisory program frequently enough to ensure that demands on the system are met.
Historically, this term was essentially associated with
IBM's line of
mainframe
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...
operating systems starting with
OS/360. In other operating systems, the supervisor is generally called the
kernel
Kernel may refer to:
Computing
* Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems
* Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution
* Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming
* Kernel method, in machine learni ...
.
In the 1970s, IBM further abstracted the supervisor
state from the hardware, resulting in a
hypervisor
A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...
that enabled
full virtualization, i.e. the capacity to run multiple operating systems on the same machine totally independently from each other. Hence the first such system was called ''Virtual Machine'' or ''
VM''.
References
*
Operating system technology
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