O.S. by Er. K.S.

Dhindsa © 2007

CASE STUDY – UNIX

Lecture Series By :

Er. Kanwalvir Singh Dhindsa

Deptt. of CSE & IT

www.dhindsa.info

1
 UNIX -- HISTORY
◆ AT&T
Ritchie & Thompson’s “Unics”
{Uniplexed Operating & Computing system}
• 1965 – Bell and GE joined project MAC at MIT to develop
Multics.
• Goal: Multicomputing and data sharing for a large group
of users.
 YEAR - 1969
Thompson and Ken Ritchie implemented an earlier
designed file system on PDP-7.
This grew into UNIX.
File system design and idea of command interpreter
(shell) as a user process came from MULTICS
Fork idea came from Berkeley’s GENIE OS. 2
O.S. by Er. K.S.Dhindsa © 2007
 UNIX -- HISTORY

 1971 – UNIX used in first real project: text processing

for BELL labs patent department
 1971 – UNIX required 16K bytes for system, 8K bytes
for user programs, 512K bytes of disk, and limit of 64K disk
bytes per file.
Thompson set out to write a new Fortran compiler but
developed a new programming language: B. B was based
on BCPL (a tool for compiler writing and systems
programming). He later improved on B and called it C
1973 – UNIX rewrittten in C (unheard of at the time)
 AT&T offered UNIX free to universities

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 UNIX -- HISTORY

1982 – First external distribution from USG – System III

UC Berkeley developed their version of UNIX (Berkeley
software Distributions).
 BSD introduced vi in 2BSD, demand-pages virtual
memory in 3BSD, TCP/IP networking protocol in 4.2BSD.
 Less than 3% of BSD written in assembly.

 YEAR 1991 – Finnish student Linus Torvalds wrote

Linux for 80386, 32 bit processor

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BSD Layer Structure

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 SYSTEM CALL & FILE MANIPULATION

Three categories of system calls in UNIX :

 File manipulation (same system calls also support

device manipulation)
Process control & Information manipulation.
• A file is a sequence of bytes; the kernel does not impose a
structure on files.
• Files are organized in tree-structured directories
• Path name: identifies a file by specifying a path through the
directory structure to the file.
– Absolute path names start at root of file system
– Relative path names start at the current directory
• System calls for basic file manipulation: create, open, read, write,
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close, unlink, trunc.
O.S. by Er. K.S.Dhindsa © 2007
UNIX DIRECTORY STRUCTURE

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 Design Philosophy

• Simplicity
• C language
• Time-sharing
• Simple user interface (modular and may be
replaced)
• Device independence (treat files and devices
in same manner)
• Aimed for programming environment
• Flexibility

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 UNIX - Design Principles

• Designed to be a time-sharing system.

• Has a simple standard user interface (shell) that can
be replaced.
• File system with multilevel tree-structured directories.
• Files are supported by the kernel as unstructured
sequences of bytes.
• Supports multiple processes; a process can easily
create new processes.
• High priority given to making system interactive, and
providing facilities for program development.
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 Absolute & Relative Paths

• A pathname (or path) is a route from the

root to the file or directory in question
• Directory names are separated by /’s
• A path beginning with a / is an absolute
path
• What is a relative path ?????

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 SHELL
•Programs such as shell and vi interact with kernel using
well defined system call procedures.
 Most of what is considered the Unix
interface is really the SHELL INTERFACE
◆ The shell is equivalent to COMMAND.COM on DOS
• sh the Bourne shell (after its creator)
• ksh the Korn Shell: sh plus visual editing
• csh the C-shell: introduced C-style programming
features
• tcsh: csh plus visual editing
• bash the Bourne Again SHell: sh plus visual editing
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O.S. by Er. K.S.Dhindsa © 2007
 Role of SHELLS

• Shells provide:
– Multiple commands on a single line
– Redirection of input and output (like >>)
– Expansion of wildcard filenames
– Background execution
– Pipelines
– Script-programming facility
• Normally the shell waits for a command to complete
before prompting for another command
• Can run a job in the background and not wait for it
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 PROCESS MANAGEMENT

• Process is program in execution

• Consists of machine instructions (text), data, and
stack regions.
• Separate stack for user and kernel mode.
• PID (Process ID)
• Processes are either user processes, daemon
processes, or kernel processes.
• Daemons are not associated with user, but do
system wide functions. Init may create daemons that
exist throughout the life of the system or as needed.

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 Process Management

• Initial boot process (0) forks a child (process 1) and

process 0 becomes the swapper. Process 1 is init
process and is ancestor of all other processes.
• Parent/Child/Sibling relationship indicated by pointers
in process table.
• Execve usually called to replace memory portion of
new process.
• Exit – process termination
• Wait – Parent waits for child to exit. Reclaims
process resources.
• Process group ID (GID) in process table

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 Process Management

 Round robin multilevel feedback queue

 At end of context switch, kernel executes algorithm to

schedule a process

 Highest priority process which is ready is scheduled.

On tie, picks the one which has waited the longest.

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 CPU SCHEDULING
• Every process has a scheduling priority associated with it;
larger numbers indicate lower priority.
• Negative feedback in CPU scheduling makes it difficult for a
single process to take all the CPU time.
• Process aging is employed to prevent starvation.
• When a process chooses to relinquish the CPU, it goes to
sleep on an event.
• When that event occurs, the system process that knows
about it calls wakeup with the address corresponding to the
event, and all processes that had done a sleep on the
same address are put in the ready queue to be run.

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 Memory Management

 The scheduler process (or swapper) decides which

processes to swap in or out, considering such factors as
time idle, time in or out of main memory, size, etc.

 If there is too much contention, processes are

swapped out until enough memory is available.
Allocation of both main memory and swap space is
done first-fit.

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 FILE SYSTEM COMMANDS

• pwd - report your current directory

• cd <to where> - change your current directory
• ls <directory> -list contents of directory
• cp <old file> <new file> - copy
• mv <old file> <new file> - move (or rename)
• rm <file> -delete a file
• mkdir <new directory name> -make a directory
• rmdir <directory> -remove an empty directory
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UNIX through GENERATIONS

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UNIX

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UNIX Utility Programs

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UNIX Kernel

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 PROCESS CONTROL -- UNIX

• Processes communicate via pipes; queues of bytes

between two processes that are accessed by a file
descriptor.
• All user processes are descendants of one original
process, init.
• init forks a getty process: initializes terminal line
parameters and passes the user’s login name to login.
– login sets the numeric user identifier of the process to
that of the user
– executes a shell which forks subprocesses for user
commands.

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 USER INTERFACE IN UNIX

• Programmers and users mainly deal with already existing

systems programs: the needed system calls are
embedded within the program and do not need to be
obvious to the user.
• The most common systems programs are file or directory
oriented.
– Directory: mkdir, rmdir, cd, pwd
– File: ls, cp, mv, rm
• Other programs relate to editors (e.g., emacs, vi) text
formatters (e.g., troff, TEX), and other activities.

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 PROCESS CONTROL BLOCKS
• The most basic data structure associated with processes is
the process structure.
– unique process identifier
– scheduling information (e.g., priority)
– pointers to other control blocks
• The virtual address space of a user process is divided into
text (program code), data, and stack segments.
• Every process with sharable text has a pointer form its
process structure to a text structure.
– always resident in main memory.
– records how many processes are using the text segment
– records were the page table for the text segment can be
found on disk when it is swapped. 25
O.S. by Er. K.S.Dhindsa © 2007
 PAGING

• Berkeley UNIX systems depend primarily on paging for

memory-contention management, and depend only
secondarily on swapping.
• Demand paging – When a process needs a page and the
page is not there, a page fault to the kernel occurs, a frame
of main memory is allocated, and the proper disk page is
read into the frame.
• If the scheduler decides that the paging system is
overloaded, processes will be swapped out whole until the
overload is relieved.

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 C-LISTS

• Terminal drivers use a character buffering system which

involves keeping small blocks of characters in linked lists.
• A write system call to a terminal enqueues characters on
a list for the device. An initial transfer is started, and
interrupts cause dequeueing of characters and further
transfers.
• Input is similarly interrupt driven.
• It is also possible to have the device driver bypass the
canonical queue and return characters directly form the
raw queue — raw mode (used by full-screen editors and
other programs that need to react to every keystroke).

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O.S. by Er. K.S.Dhindsa © 2007
 System Calls for Process Management
A file is represented by an inode — a record that
stores information about a specific file on the disk.

s is an error code
pid is a process ID
residual is the remaining time from the previous alarm
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 Booting UNIX

The sequences of processes used to boot some systems

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 NETWORKING

Use of sockets for networking

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UNIX I/O SYSTEM

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

• The pipe is the IPC mechanism most

characteristic of UNIX

– Permits a reliable unidirectional byte stream

between two processes.
– A benefit of pipes small size is that pipe data
are seldom written to disk; they usually are
kept in memory by the normal block buffer
cache.

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 UNIX File System

Some important directories found in most UNIX systems

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 UNIX File System

(a) Before mounting. (b) After mounting

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 LOCKING FILES

(a) File with one lock

(b) Addition of a second lock
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(c) A third lock O.S. by Er. K.S.Dhindsa © 2007
 UNIX FILE SYSTEM
Disk layout in classical UNIX systems

Structure of the i-node 36

O.S. by Er. K.S.Dhindsa © 2007
 UNIX FILE SYSTEM

The relation between the file descriptor table, the open file
description 37
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 SECURITY IN UNIX

Some examples of file protection modes

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O.S. by Er. K.S.Dhindsa © 2007

CASE STUDY – UNIX

Lecture Series By :

Er. Kanwalvir Singh Dhindsa

Deptt. of CSE & IT

www.dhindsa.info

39