> Are SREs and DevOps tasked with administration of operating systems?

yes, eventually.

you can dress it up in all the fancy terms that you like. but devops and SREs are sysadmins with better PR.

its critical that SREs understand _how_ to debug a system, so that they can work out how to put in fixes, and or design better systems.

Both SRE and DevOps are essentially evolved sysadmin roles. The DevOps philosophy is cross-functional and many sysadmins have adopted a DevOps approach. The latest edition of the classic sysadmin book "The Practice of System and Network Administration" is now centered around DevOps.

If you have ops somewhere in your responsibilities, then yes.

depends on what layer the issue is happening at. I know everyone thinks the OS has been abstracted away but my ticket queue says otherwise. "yaml engineering" is just a control surface, I still need to pop the hood often.

Yeah. Random data point: One of my most favorite SRE interviews ever (serious fun!) involved hands-on troubleshooting that eventually required gdb.

How do you automate something you can't do manually?