A kernel is a central component of an operating system. It acts as an interface between the user applications and the hardware. The sole aim of the kernel is to manage the communication between the software (user level applications) and the hardware (CPU, disk memory etc). The main tasks of the kernel are :
Process management
Device management
Memory management
Interrupt handling
I/O communication
File system...etc..
2. Is LINUX A Kernel Or An Operating System? Well, there is a difference between kernel and OS. Kernel as described above is the heart of OS which manages the core features of an OS while if some useful applications and utilities are added over the kernel, then the complete package becomes an OS. So, it can easily be said that an operating system consists of a kernel space and a user space. So, we can say that Linux is a kernel as it does not include applications like file-system utilities, windowing systems and graphical desktops, system administrator commands, text editors, compilers etc. So, various companies add these kind of applications over linux kernel and provide their operating system like ubuntu, suse, centOS, redHat etc. 3. Types Of Kernels Kernels may be classified mainly in two categories
Monolithic
Micro Kernel
Starting with Ubuntu 16.04, our datacenter began configuring servers to use the standard behavior of letting the operating system choose its own kernel. If your server was an Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04 server when you created it, you do not need to do anything. All servers created as Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04 servers use the new kernel management.
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