• Understand the function and purpose of an operating system

• Describe memory management (paging, segmentation and virtual memory)

• Describe the role of interrupts and an Interrupt Service Routine (ISR) within the fetch-decode-execute cycle

• Describe the need for processor scheduling algorithms

• Describe scheduling algorithms: round robin, first-come, first-served, multi-level feedback queues, shortest job first and the shortest remaining time

• Describe distributed, embedded, multi-tasking, multi-user and real-time operating systems

• Describe BIOS, device drivers and virtual machines

• Distinguish between systems software and applications software

• Describe what is meant by a utility program and giving examples

• Be able to justify a suitable application for a specific purpose

• Distinguish between open source and closed source software

• Understand the role of an assembler, compiler and interpreter

• Explain the difference between compilation and interpretation, and describe situations when each would be appropriate

• Explain why an intermediate language such as bytecode is produced as the final output by some compilers and how it is then used

• Describe the stages of compilation: lexical analysis, syntax analysis, code generation and optimisation

• Describe the function of linkers and loaders

• Describe the use of libraries

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