8.3 PROTECTED ENVIRONMENTS
To provide protection, multiuser operating systems guard against processes running amok in the system. Process execution must be isolated from both the operating system and other processes. Access to shared resources must be controlled and mediated to avoid conflicts. There are a number of ways in which protective barriers can be erected in a system. In this section, we examine three of them: virtual machines, subsystems, and partitions.
8.3.1 Virtual Machines
The time-sharing systems of the 1950s and 1960s continually wrestled with problems relating to shared resources such as memory, magnetic storage, card readers, printers, and processor cycles. The hardware of this era could not support the solutions that ...
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