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Comment by lou1306

14 hours ago

> It’s not simply to “provide access to hardware resources”; plenty of embedded systems do that with runtimes that have no business calling themselves an “OS”. No, the core purpose of a modern operating system is to partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.

First of all the initial definition is totally correct, and if your embedded function needs to call an intermediate layer to access the hardware that layer is an OS. Second of all, all those "purposes" are exactly achieved by providing _managed_ access to hardware resources.

And that is valuable in whatever world we end up living in. Sure, 10 years from now my bank app and my Hacker News browser may both be written by "my LLM" and tailored to my use cases and desires. Will I want them to share memory? I don't think so.