<P> A supervisory program or supervisor is a computer program, usually part of an operating system, that controls the execution of other routines and regulates work scheduling, input / output operations, error actions, and similar functions and regulates the flow of work in a data processing system . </P> <P> It can also refer to a program that allocates computer component space and schedules computer events by task queuing and system interrupts . Control of the system is returned to the supervisory program frequently enough to ensure that demands on the system are met . </P> <P> Historically, this term was essentially associated with IBM's line of mainframe operating systems starting with OS / 360 . In other operating systems, the supervisor is generally called the kernel . </P> <P> In the 1970s, IBM further abstracted the supervisor state from the hardware, resulting in a hypervisor that enabled full virtualization, i.e. the capacity to run multiple operating systems on the same machine totally independently from each other . Hence the first such system was called Virtual Machine or VM . </P>

The supervisor program in an operating system (os) is also known as the