The lowest-level functions supplied by the OS/2 operating system are those provided by the kernel and the kernel's subsystems-the control programs of the operating system. The Control Program functions involve the most basic aspects of program execution, such as memory management, file handling, and process, thread, and session management. They also involve more sophisticated programming tasks, such as exception handling and interprocess communications. The names of all the system functions in the Control Program API are prefixed with the letters "Dos", as in DosAllocMem.

This book describes the following topics from the operating system's Control Program API:

• File and disk management
  
• Memory management
  
• Program execution control (Process and session management)
  
• Semaphores
  
• Pipes
  
• Queues
  
• Timing functions
  
• Error handling
  
• Exception handling
  
• Device I/O support
  
• Message management
  
• National language support and code page management
  
• Debugging
  
• Dynamic Linking