Ever clicked an icon and wondered how your program starts? Meet the Loader Module, the unsung hero in your operating system! This video breaks down how it loads programs from your disk to RAM, sets up processes, and gets your apps ready to roll. Perfect for tech newbies or curious coders! Join us for a fun, easy-to-follow explanation, and stick around for more OS secrets. Subscribe, comment your thoughts, and scan the QR code to explore more tutorials on our site! Let’s geek out together!
Introduction to Loader Module 00:00:00
What is the Loader Module 00:00:10
Role in Operating Systems 00:00:14
Loading Process Overview 00:00:21
Program Execution Trigger 00:00:44
Signal to Operating System 00:01:00
Executable Validation 00:01:43
Memory Allocation 00:02:31
Process Creation 00:03:05
Process Setup Completion 00:04:22
Operating System Scheduling 00:04:54
Multitasking Illusion 00:05:24
Process Termination 00:05:59
Loader Module Limitations 00:06:11
Conclusion and Summary 00:06:28
Call to Subscribe 00:07:00
Website and Community 00:07:56
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Hey there! Let’s talk about the Loader Module for just a second.
What is the Loader Module? For starters, you probably have one on your computer at home.
Almost, I mean, as far as I understand, every major operating system has a Loader Module.
I would be surprised if an operating system did not have one.
The Loader Module is basically responsible for getting your program loaded from your hard disk,
your hard disk your ssd or whatever into ram and sort of setting it up setting up an empty process
and getting it all prepared so that the operating system can begin executing your process doesn’t
actually execute it it just gets it set up so i mean think about it what if i click on my desktop
here and i click on this little mouse icon this little text editor icon the mouse pad
it launched what happened it wasn’t running before and now it is running something had to do that
It wasn’t the desktop environment actually the desktop environment when I click this little button
It just sent a signal to the operating system letting it know that I wanted to start executing a program
But it didn’t actually load it up for me. That’s the loader module. The loader module is part of the operating system
and imagine that as soon as I
You know click this button right here a signal gets sent to the operating system or maybe even if I just execute a command like echo
You know test or something or run get get status. Let’s say
status let’s say or even I could run this terminal again terminator and it
shows up in another window something like that let me exit from that you know
anything that I exit whatever the loader module is involved so I click this and
the first thing that will happen is the loader module will inspect the
executable which is just kind of sitting on disk somewhere and it’ll make sure
that it’s actually executable it’ll make sure not just in terms of you know
That’s sort of an operating system thing, a different part of the operating system.
But it’ll check to make sure, let’s say that it’s a binary program that needs to be executed.
It’ll make sure that the data inside of the binary, the actual executable is correct for
the current system that you’re on.
Like right now I’m on Linux 64 bit.
So it’ll make sure that the executable is in a ELF 64 format or a format that can be
executed.
It’ll check that it’ll make sure everything’s okay to make sure it’s got some data. It’s got like a you know an entry point whatever
If everything looks good, then it will go through system RAM and try to find a little place in RAM that’s unoccupied
I’m not going to talk too much about operating system concepts beyond the loader module, but just so you know
There is a paging system that it would go through which sort of lets you have fragmented memory without too much of a penalty
the ram stick directly but for our purposes we’ll just say it’s looking for a free spot in memory
anyway once it finds out that there’s a free spot in memory that’s big enough to accommodate
the program then it actually loads the program from disk from ssd from whatever into that spot
in memory and creates a process in the operating system remember everything that’s actually running
in your operating system is a process there’s a process for this notepad there’s a process
for the mouse stuff there’s a process for this little widget down here there’s a
process for the entire desktop there’s a process for probably every tab in your
browser you know a process just means here’s a little spot in memory on the
computer and it’s got a program inside of it and it wants to be run by the CPU
whenever the CPU thinks that it has some time to run that process so that’s like
a process anyway so it you know it finds a spot in memory it loads the program in
you know checks everything it sets it up as a process which means it has to set up some data
structures in the operating system indicating hey there’s a new process in town and here’s where the
memory is and here’s the first instruction that you should execute and it just kind of sets
everything up so that it’s like a like a ready process a process in the ready state that hasn’t
been actually executed yet but it’s ready to get executed so once it does all of that
new process you know setting everything up maybe figuring out what is the virtual memory address
that the process is going to see and so forth then finally it lets the operating system know
that the process is ready to run so before it was just kind of like loading it and setting it up
marking little flags figuring out the virtual memory offset all that stuff then once that’s
all finished it just tells the operating system now this process is ready to run the process
I’m going to try my best not to talk too much about operating systems concepts beyond the loader module, but
the loader module’s job is not to run the process. It’s just to load it, just to set it up.
At some later point in time, maybe some amount of microseconds or milliseconds in the future,
the operating system will decide, okay, now I’m ready to let that program run for a little while.
Since the process has already been set up by the loader module, the operating system knows where
it is in memory and it knows the next instruction address or offset address to execute. It’ll just
set address to execute it’ll just start bringing those instructions onto the CPU and just execute
them for some amount of time and then the operating system will decide to stop and take it off the CPU
again you know put it back just into a into a ready state and then it just keeps switching back
and forth between that by the way have you ever wondered how it is that maybe your CPU only has
one core or only eight cores but there are hundreds of browser tabs that you have open
hundreds and hundreds of processes that you have open that’s how the operating system does it it
it simulates it provides the illusion that all these programs are running at the same time so
this notepad process right here it’s not actually running at all times it just runs in tiny little
slices again i’ll try to stay away from explaining that too much because i’m really here to talk
about the loader module another thing to keep in mind is that eventually when your process terminates
like the the program terminates itself or the operating system kills it for some reason or just
or just, you know, something happens to where it’s just not going to be running anymore.
It’s not the loader module that has anything to do with that.
And there is no unloader module.
It will just mark itself as, you know, I’m done, I’m terminated, whatever,
or it’ll get marked.
Then the operating system will come along and clean it up.
So loader module is not involved in that step.
It’s just involved in getting everything set up so that it can start to execute.
And that’s the basic idea.
detailed but that’s what the loader module does in general and you probably
have a loader module on your operating system right now unless you’re running
some bizarre operating system that has some other strange method of doing
things okay that’s all I really wanted to say in this video thank you so much
for watching I hope you learned a little bit of stuff and had some fun I’ll see
you in the next video
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