kernel, meat (noun)

the inner and usually edible part of a seed or grain or nut or fruit stone

"black walnut kernels are difficult to get out of the shell"

kernel (noun)

a single whole grain of a cereal

"a kernel of corn"

kernel, substance, core, center, centre, essence, gist, heart, heart and soul, inwardness, marrow, meat, nub, pith, sum, nitty-gritty (noun)

the choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience

"the gist of the prosecutor's argument"; "the heart and soul of the Republican Party"; "the nub of the story"

kernel (Noun)

The core, center, or essence of an object or system.

kernel (Noun)

The central (usually edible) part of a nut, especially once the hard shell has been removed.

kernel (Noun)

A single seed or grain, especially of corn or wheat.

kernel (Noun)

The central part of many computer operating systems which manages the system's resources and the communication between hardware and software components.

kernel (Noun)

The stone of certain fruits, such as peaches or plums.

kernel (Noun)

Those elements, in the domain of a function, which the function maps to zero.

kernel (Noun)

The set of members of a fuzzy set which are fully included (i.e., whose grade of membership is 1).

Kernel

In computing, the kernel is the main component of most computer operating systems; it is a bridge between applications and the actual data processing done at the hardware level. The kernel's responsibilities include managing the system's resources. Usually, as a basic component of an operating system, a kernel can provide the lowest-level abstraction layer for the resources that application software must control to perform its function. It typically makes these facilities available to application processes through inter-process communication mechanisms and system calls. Operating system tasks are done differently by different kernels, depending on their design and implementation. While monolithic kernels execute all the operating system code in the same address space to increase the performance of the system, microkernels run most of the operating system services in user space as servers, aiming to improve maintainability and modularity of the operating system. A range of possibilities exists between these two extremes.