KERNEL

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..

Difference between kernel & O.S

The kernel is part of the operating system and closer to the hardware it provides low level services like:

• device driver
• process management
• memory management
• system calls

An operating system also includes applications like the user interface (shell,gui,tools and services).

So the ultimate difference is ,

1. Kernel is responsible for Hardware level interactions at some specific range.But the OS is like hardware level interaction with full scope of computer.
2. Kernel triggers SystemCalls to intimate os that this resource is available at this point of time.OS is responsible to handle that system calls in order to utilize the resource.