Executive Services

Executive Services is simply a label given to a diverse set of components that provide the basics
of an operating system. These basic services offered by the kernel executive include the
following:

o Virtual Memory Manager—This component of the Executive is responsible for managing

the 4GB virtual address space for each process, as well as paging in and out of physical memory
all the pages of memory the operating system or an application needs at any particular time.
o Local Procedure Call Facility—This component is responsible for interprocess
communications. This component is necessary because each process uses the same virtual
address space.
o Process Manager—When it comes time to start or shut down a process, this component
of ...

Kernal
The kernel sits between the hardware abstraction layer and the Executive to provide
multiprocessor synchronization, thread and interrupt scheduling and dispatching, and trap
handling and exception dispatching. The kernel is also responsible for initializing device drivers
at bootup

Environmental subsystems
are user-mode processes layered over the native Windows XP executive services to enable
Windows XP to run programs developed for other operating systems, including 16-bit Windows,
MS-DOS, and POSIX. Each environmental subsystem provides a single
application environment.

integral subsystems
The integral subsystems are services that provide the APIs that Win32 applications call to
perform important operating system functions, such as creating windows and opening files. It
has five main components, which utilize four main support functions: Process and thread
manager.