What component of an operating system's kernel is responsible for managing the system's primary memory?

The Memory Manager is a crucial component of an operating system's kernel that is specifically designed to handle the allocation and management of the system's primary memory, which is typically RAM. This involves various tasks such as keeping track of each byte in the computer's memory, allocating portions of memory to different processes as needed, and managing the swapping of data between the RAM and disk storage.

The Memory Manager ensures efficient memory usage by preventing memory leaks, avoiding fragmentation, and managing memory protection for different processes, which enhances the overall stability and performance of the operating system. Without a well-functioning Memory Manager, applications could interfere with one another or run inefficiently due to poor memory management.

In contrast, device drivers are responsible for interfacing the operating system with hardware devices, the shell provides the user interface for interacting with the operating system, and services are background processes that perform tasks for the system and applications but do not specifically handle memory management. Thus, the correct response directly relates to the effective handling of primary memory by the Memory Manager within the OS kernel.