Chapter Four

Device Management
4.1 Introduction

• Device management is the process of managing the implementation, operation and

maintenance of a physical and/or virtual device.
• It is a broad term that includes various administrative tools and processes for the
maintenance and upkeep of a computing, network, mobile and/or virtual device.

Device management generally performs the following:

• Installing device and component-level drivers and related software

• Configuring a device so it performs as expected using the bundled operating system,
business/workflow software and/or with other hardware devices.
• Implementing security measures and processes.

Devices usually refer to physical/hardware devices such as computers, laptops, servers, mobile
phones and more.

They could also be virtual, however, such as virtual machines or virtual switches.

In Windows, device management is also an administrative module that is used for managing or
configuring the physical devices, ports and interfaces of a computer or server.

4.2 Characteristics of serial and parallel data transmission in devices

What is data transmission?

Data transmission refers to the process of transferring data between two or more digital devices.
Data is transmitted from one device to another in analog or digital format. Basically, data
transmission enables devices or components within devices to speak to each other.

How does data transmission work between digital devices?

• Data is transferred in the form of bits between two or more digital devices.
• There are two methods used to transmit data between digital devices: serial transmission and
parallel transmission.
• Serial data transmission sends data bits one after another over a single channel. Parallel data
transmission sends multiple data bits at the same time over multiple channels.
Serial Transmission

• In Serial Transmission, data is sent bit by bit from one device to another in bi-direction where
each bit has its clock pulse rate.
• Eight bits are transferred at a time having a start and stop bit (usually known as a Parity bit),
i.e. 0 and 1 respectively.
• For transmitting data to a longer distance, serial data cables are used. However, the data
transferred in the serial transmission is in proper order. It consists of a D-shaped 9 pin cable
that connects the data in series.

• Serial Transmission has two subclasses synchronous and asynchronous.

• In asynchronous transmission, an extra bit is added to each byte so that the receiver is alert
about the arrival of new data. Usually, 0 is a start bit, and 1 is the stop bit.
• In synchronous transmission, no extra bit is added rather the data transferred in the form of
frames which contains multiple bytes.
• The serial transmission system would not be able to work without installing hardware at the
sending and receiving. The hardware residing in the sending and receiving end is capable of
converting the data from the parallel mode (used in the device) to the serial mode (used in the
wires).

Parallel Transmission

• In Parallel Transmission, various bits are sent together simultaneously with a single clock
pulse.
• It is a fast way to transmit as it uses many input/output lines for transferring the data.
• Furthermore, it is advantageous because it conforms to the underlying hardware also, as the
electronic devices like computer and communication hardware uses parallel circuitry
internally.
• The installation and troubleshooting are easier in parallel transmission system due to its
placement in a single physical cable.
• Parallel Transmission uses a 25 pin port having 17 signal lines and 8 ground lines. The 17
signal lines are further divided as

• 4 lines that initiate handshaking,

• Status lines used to communicate and notify errors and
• 8 to transfer data.

Despite the speed of the data, the parallel transmission has a limitation called skew where bits
could travel in quite different speeds over the wires.

• For transferring data between computers, laptops, two methods are used, namely, Serial
Transmission and Parallel Transmission.
• There are some similarities and dissimilarities between them.
• One of the primary differences is that; in Serial Transmission, data is sent bit by bit whereas,
in Parallel Transmission a byte (8 bits) or character is sent at a time.
• The similarity is that both are used to connect and communicate with peripheral devices.
• Furthermore, the parallel transmission is time-sensitive, whereas serial transmission is not
time-sensitive. Other differences are discussed below.

Both Serial and Parallel Transmission have their advantages and disadvantages, respectively.

• Parallel Transmission is used for a limited distance, provides higher speed.

• On the other hand, Serial Transmission is reliable for transferring data to longer distance.
Hence, we conclude that both serial and parallel are individually essential for transferring data.

4.3 Buffering strategies

Buffering

• In computer system when the speed in which data is received and the speed in which data is
processed are different, then there we use the buffer.
• Buffer is a memory space which stores the input data and pass it on to the system according to
this speed in this way there is no need to hold the input device until it is processed.
• simply the data will be stored in buffer and the used by the system.
• The buffer can be of any type, hardware or software, but in general software buffer are used
widely.

Example – In printers spoolers, we can pass a large no of pages to print as input, but the
processing/printing is slow. Here buffering is used.

• I/O buffering the process of temporarily storing data that is passing between a processor and
a peripheral.
• The usual purpose is to smooth out the difference in rates at which the two devices can
handle data.

I/O buffering and its Various Techniques

A buffer is a memory area that stores data being transferred between two devices or between a
device and an application.

Uses of I/O Buffering

• Buffering is done to deal effectively with a speed mismatch between the producer and
consumer of the data stream.
• A buffer is produced in main memory to heap up the bytes received from modem.
• After receiving the data in the buffer, the data get transferred to disk from buffer in a
single operation.
• This process of data transfer is not instantaneous; therefore, the modem needs another
buffer in order to store additional incoming data.
• When the first buffer got filled, then it is requested to transfer the data to disk.
• The modem then starts filling the additional incoming data in the second buffer while the
data in the first buffer getting transferred to disk.
• When both the buffers completed their tasks, then the modem switches back to the first
buffer while the data from the second buffer get transferred to the disk.
• The use of two buffers disintegrates the producer and the consumer of the data, thus
minimizes the time requirements between them.
• Buffering also provides variations for devices that have different data transfer sizes.

Types of various I/O buffering techniques

1. Single buffer
A buffer is provided by the operating system to the system portion of the main memory.

Block oriented device

• System buffer takes the input.

• After taking the input, the block gets transferred to the user space by the process and then
the process requests for another block.
• Two blocks work simultaneously, when one block of data is processed by the user
process, the next block is being read in.
• OS can swap the processes.
• OS can record the data of system buffer to user processes.

Stream oriented device

• Line- at a time operation is used for scroll made terminals. User inputs one line at a time,
with a carriage return signaling at the end of a line.
 • Byte-at a time operation is used on forms mode, terminals when each keystroke is
significant.

2. Double buffer

Block oriented

• There are two buffers in the system.

• One buffer is used by the driver or controller to store data while waiting for it to be taken
by higher level of the hierarchy.
• Other buffer is used to store data from the lower-level module.
• Double buffering is also known as buffer swapping.
• A major disadvantage of double buffering is that the complexity of the process get
increased.
• If the process performs rapid bursts of I/O, then using double buffering may be deficient.

Stream oriented

• Line- at a time I/O, the user process need not be suspended for input or output, unless
process runs ahead of the double buffer.
• Byte- at a time operation, double buffer offers no advantage over a single buffer of twice
the length.
3. Circular buffer

• When more than two buffers are used, the collection of buffers is itself referred to as a
circular buffer.
• In this, the data do not directly pass from the producer to the consumer because the data
would change due to overwriting of buffers before they had been consumed.
• The producer can only fill up to buffer i-1 while data in buffer i is waiting to be
consumed.

4.4 Direct Memory Accesses

• Many devices can temporarily take control of the bus and perform data transfers to (and from)
main memory or other devices.
• Because the device is doing the work without the help of the CPU, this type of data transfer is
known as direct memory access (DMA).
• DMA transfers can be performed between two devices, between a device and memory, or
between memory and memory. This chapter explains transfers between a device and memory
only.
• Direct memory access (DMA) is a method that allows an input/output (I/O) device to send or
receive data directly to or from the main memory, bypassing the CPU to speed up memory
operations.
• The process is managed by a chip known as a DMA controller (DMAC).
• A defined portion of memory is used to send data directly from a peripheral to the motherboard
without involving the microprocessor, so that the process does not interfere with overall
computer operation.

In older computers, four DMA channels were numbered 0, 1, 2 and 3. When the 16-bit industry
standard architecture (ISA) expansion bus was introduced, channels 5, 6 and 7 were added.
ISA was a computer bus standard for IBM-compatible computers, allowing a device to initiate
transactions (bus mastering) at a quicker speed. The ISA DMA controller has 8 DMA channels,
each one of which associated with a 16-bit address and count registers. ISA has since been replaced
by accelerated graphics port (AGP) and peripheral component interconnect (PCI) expansion cards,
which are much faster. Each DMA transfers approximately 2 MB of data per second.

A computer’s system resource tools are used for communication between hardware and software.

✓ The four types of system resources are:

• I/O addresses.
• Memory addresses.
• Interrupt request numbers (IRQ).
• Direct memory access (DMA) channels.

✓ DMA channels are used to communicate data between the peripheral device and the system
memory.
✓ All four system resources rely on certain lines on a bus. Some lines on the bus are used for
IRQs, some for addresses (the I/O addresses and the memory address) and some for DMA
channels.
✓ A DMA channel enables a device to transfer data without exposing the CPU to a work
overload. Without the DMA channels, the CPU copies every piece of data using a peripheral
bus from the I/O device.
✓ Using a peripheral bus occupies the CPU during the read/write process and does not allow
other work to be performed until the operation is completed.
✓ With DMA, the CPU can process other tasks while data transfer is being performed.
✓ The transfer of data is first initiated by the CPU. The data block can be transferred to and from
memory by the DMAC in three ways.
1. In burst mode, the system bus is released only after the data transfer is completed.
2. In cycle stealing mode, during the transfer of data between the DMA channel and I/O
device, the system bus is relinquished for a few clock cycles so that the CPU can perform
other tasks. When the data transfer is complete, the CPU receives an interrupt request from
the DMA controller.
3. In transparent mode, the DMAC can take charge of the system bus only when it is not
required by the processor.
✓ However, using a DMA controller might cause cache coherency problems.
✓ The data stored in RAM accessed by the DMA controller may not be updated with the correct
cache data if the CPU is using external memory.
✓ Solutions include flushing cache lines before starting outgoing DMA transfers, or performing
a cache invalidation on incoming DMA transfers when external writes are signaled to the cache
controller.
4.5 Recovery from failure

• Recovery from Failure is a phrase used to describe a need in aviation to continue real-time
operations to a safe conclusion despite a critical part of a system (technical, procedural, or
human) failing, sometimes at the most crucial time.
• To maintain high availability of its stored data, ScaleOut StateServer creates up to two replicas
of every stored data object (up to three copies total as determined by
the max_replicas parameter).
• These replicas are apportioned to other hosts so as to maintain the overall load-balance.
• The number of replicas per object depends on the number of available hosts:

• All updates to an object are transactionally applied to its replicas using a patented, quorum-
based updating algorithm.
• When a host fails or suffers a network outage, ScaleOut StateServer uses the replicas on other
hosts to preserve stored data and to provide continued access to the affected objects.
• If a host suffers only a brief network outage, it resumes management of its objects once the
outage has been corrected.
• Otherwise, in a process called self-healing, one of the replica’s hosts takes over management
of each affected object, and an additional replica is created on another surviving host.
• (The failed host leaves the store.) Note that a host’s failure only affects the objects managed
by that host; other objects usually remain continuously available during the recovery process.

Detecting Failures

ScaleOut StateServer uses periodic heartbeat packet exchanges between pairs of hosts to detect a
network outage or host failure. To minimize overall networking overhead, ScaleOut StateServer
uses a highly efficient heartbeat algorithm that limits the number of heartbeat exchanges per second
so that overhead grows slowly with the number of hosts. Under normal conditions, the maximum
network bandwidth consumed by a host to send heartbeat packets is less than 1K bytes/second.

Based on extensive evaluation of IP load balancing on server farms, ScaleOut StateServer uses a
default heartbeat exchange rate of one heartbeat packet per 300 milliseconds. A host reports a
possible outage if twenty consecutive heartbeat packets are not received from a remote host. This
indicates that either one of the hosts has a network outage or the remote host has failed. Once an
outage has been detected, the host begins a recovery process to isolate the problem and recover
from a failure.
The Recovery Process

After a heartbeat failure occurs, all hosts engage in a recovery protocol to establish the currently
responding membership. Hosts that do not respond because of server failures or network outages
are dropped from the membership of the distributed store. This process takes approximately five
to ten seconds after the heartbeat failure occurs. After the new membership is established, the hosts
perform a self-healing process in which:

• the hosts that are determined to have failed are removed from the membership,
• lost copies of stored objects are replicated on other hosts to restore full redundancy (i.e.,
one or two replicas per object for farms with three or more hosts),
• heartbeat exchanges are initiated between appropriate surviving hosts to replace the
terminated exchanges, and
• all hosts rebalance the storage load across the new membership. The self-healing and
dynamic rebalancing process may require a minute or more to replicate the affected
objects on new hosts, and this will temporarily slow the rate at which access requests to
the affected objects can be handled.
• ScaleOut StateServer heals its distributed store by creating new replicas for stored objects
that were lost due to a server failure or network outage.
• This restores the full redundancy of the distributed store. If two or more servers are
removed from the membership during the recovery process, some objects may be
permanently lost.
• In this case, the store will return object_not_found exceptions for access requests to
missing objects. To maintain service whenever possible, ScaleOut StateServer attempts to
self-heal and restore service even if no copies of an object still exist.
• A host which suffers a network outage and cannot reach the network displays
the isolated status and assigns all remote hosts an unknown status.
• The host suspends all handling of access requests until the network outage is corrected.
This helps to maintain the consistency of stored data; see Split-Brain Failures below.
• A host becomes isolated when its connection to the network switch is unplugged, as shown
in the following diagram.
• This will cause the host to suspend its handling of access requests, and other hosts may
remove it from the membership.
• It may not be possible for the ScaleOut service to detect this condition under all situations,
in which case the host will form an independent membership.
• Once an active host can again reach the network, it determines if it is in the current
membership.
• Remote hosts may have formed a new membership that excludes the host so that they can
recover from the network outage.
• In this case, the host automatically restarts the StateServer service so that the host can rejoin
the distributed store. T
• his behavior ensures that an isolated host does not interfere with other hosts once a new
membership has been formed.
• To enable recovery from switch failures, ScaleOut StateServer does not automatically restart
an isolated hostafter it waits for a fixed recovery interval. Instead, it waits indefinitely for the
network outage to be corrected and then determines whether to restart the StateServer service.