CS 422S

Operating Systems Organization:

Introduction

Fred Kuhns
[email protected]
Applied Research Laboratory,
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Washington University in St. Louis

Washington
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST LOUIS
 Operating Systems Organization
• Instructor: Fred Kuhns
Phone: 935-6598
Email: [email protected]
Office Hours: Bryan 411
Monday/Wednesday 4:00-5:00

• Location: Lopata Room 101

Times: Monday/Wednesday 2:30 – 4:00
Newsgroup:wu.cs.class.422
Web: http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~fredk/Courses/cs422

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 CS422S TAs
• Xiaofeng Chen
Email: [email protected]
Office: Lopata 408
Office Hours: TBD
• Aldi Tjahjadi
Email: [email protected]
Office: Lopata 408
Office Hours: TBD
• Philip Wang
Email: [email protected]
Office: Lopata 408
Office Hours: TBD

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 Course Materials
• Textbooks
– Required: Gary Nutt, Operating Systems Third Edition, Lab Update,
Addison Wesley, 2002
– Desirable: Gregory Andrews, Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and
Distributed Programming, Addison Wesley, 2000
• Other useful references:
– UNIX Network Programming, 2nd edition, Volume 2, W. Richard Stevens,
Prentice Hall, 1998.
– The C Programming Language: Second Edition, Kernighan and Ritchie,
Prentice Hall, 1991
– The Practice of Programming, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, Addison-
Wesley, 1999
– Class handouts and presentation material
– Man pages and Web accessible documentations

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 Course Work and Grading
• Exam – 40% of grade
– mid-term 15%, final 25%
– Final is comprehensive
• Homework and Quiz – 10% of grade
– Homework problems or minor programming assignments.
– Quizzes announced or unannounced
• 4 +/- Programming Projects – 50% of grade
– Must use UNIX (Linux or Solaris as required by project
description) and C.
• Late Policy: 5 points per day for up to 3 days. After 3 days
assignments will not be accepted.
• Email policy: Please do not email questions (related to
assignments) directly to myself or the TAs, instead post then
the newsgroup so all may benefit from the questions and
answers. Of course I also encourage you to visit the TAs or
myself during office hours.
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 Grading Projects
• Design 30%
– Are all conditions covered
– Have synchronization and scheduling issues been addressed
– Used proper measurement and/or data collection techniques
– Does it demonstrate and understanding of the underlying issues
– Does solution demonstrate insight or have novel approaches been used
• Structure 20%
– Logically structured
– Understandability (comments, names etc)
– Maintainability or portability issues
• Documentation 30%
– Must include a README file (ascii, <= 80 columns/line, UNIX format)
– Does analysis address all required issues and is it insightful
– Logically structured and understandable
– Followed instructions
• Operation 20 %
– Work are specified or does it terminate in error
– Accept required parameters
– Results displayed properly
– Results correct or reasonable

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 Syllabus
• Introduction and overview of the C programming language
• Top down view of Operating Systems and System
Software
• Overview of computer architecture, devices and device
management
• Processes and threads
• CPU Scheduling (uni-, multi- and RT)
• Concurrency Issues
• Memory management and Virtual Memory
• File systems, I/O and secondary storage
• Network I/O (sockets and streams)
• Distributed Processing
• Security (if time permits)
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 Computer Systems
• Hardware and software combine to solve specific problems
– Software solves some problem: entertainment, information
management, scientific problem solving, system control, etc.
– Hardware provides the basic computing resources (Processor(s),
Memory, System Bus and I/O modules). Although strictly speaking
many solutions can be designed and implemented entirely in
hardware but this is a course on operating system.
• Software is divided into two categories:
– Application software – used directly by user (person or possibly
another program or computer system) to solve some problem.
Ultimately a computer system exists to implement applications.
– System software – think of this as convenience software: it
simplifies application programming by creating a convenient to use
programming environment. It does this implementing the low level
hardware management functions and providing a standardized (we
hope) interface and set of abstractions. For example, if you write a
C++ program you wouldn’t want to also implement the interrupt
service routines, filesystems, compilers, lingers etc..
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 Goals of an OS
• User Environment - OS layer transforms bare hardware
machine into higher level abstractions
– Execution environment - process management, file manipulation,
interrupt handling, I/O operations, language.
– Error detection and handling
– Protection and security
– Fault tolerance and failure recovery
• Resource Management: an OS is asked to be efficient,
transparent and often feature rich – no small task!
– Time management - CPU and disk transfer scheduling
– Space management - main and secondary storage allocation
– Synchronization and deadlock handling - IPC, critical section,
coordination
– Accounting and status information - resource usage tracking

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 Driving Concepts
• Abstraction: resource abstraction used to manage
complexity. Low-level computing resources (the
hardware interface) is abstracted to create an
extended machine.
• Virtualization: Resources are virtualized to permit
controlled sharing and isolation. An OS is expected to
transparently share resources among concurrently
executing programs.
• Resource management: OS ensures applications make
progress by providing policies and mechanisms that
enable both implicit and explicit allocation. Must not
impose undue performance penalties while maximizing
utilization, minimizing overhead, providing
fair/predictable access to system resources.
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 Resource Abstraction
• A computer system is composed of a collection of hardware
components, AKA resources. To gain the greatest degree of flexibility
and reduce dependence on specific HW architectures OSes
abstraction the notion of a resource to include software based
components such as files, sockets or mailboxes.
– Resource := an abstraction that represents any hardware or software
component that may be used by an application
– Resource Abstraction: provide an abstract model of hardware components
and their operation. Generally desire a common model across similar
resource types.
– OS designers goal is to select abstraction that provide the greatest
flexibility while providing a general interface that is convenient to use.
– Over generalization may result in an inflexible implementation.
• Resource Examples: Disk drive
– a disk is composed of platters, heads, sectors, tracts and blocks
– applications deal with abstract files
– operating system provides the abstract model and behavior
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 Resource Sharing
• If a system support the concurrent execution of multiple programs
(aka processes) then it must provide mechanisms and policies for
sharing system resources
– concurrency apparent or true, the later case being known as parallel
execution.
– abstract machines transparently share resources, the OS implements a
specific allocation policy to provide isolation - the OS is considered trusted
software.
– concurrent programs may also elect to explicitly share resources
– Resource Sharing may be Space-multiplexed orTime-multiplexed
• OS implements
– fundamental abstraction of hardware components and mechanisms to
manage sharing
• Examples:
– loading multiple programs into physical memory. One program can not read
or write the memory locations of another process – protection and isolation
– A program may explicitly permit another program to access part of its
memory
Fred for efficient inter-program
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 Historical Perspective

• Batch Processing – multiprogramming, batch of jobs,

no user interaction, optimize resource utilization
• Timesharing – multiprogramming, interactive, many
processes, resource isolation, optimize response time
• Personal Computing – single user multiprogramming
environment, graphics, multimedia, small OS
• Process control and real-time – dedicated to single
task, embedded systems, timing constraints, hard
versus soft
• Network OS – communication across network, local
versus remote resource management.
• Distributed OS – transparency

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 Modern OS Evolution
Timesharing Network OS

Memory Mgmt PC
Client-Server
Scheduling
Sys Software Protocols
Batch Protection
Human-Computer
Memory Mgmt Interface Real-Time
Scheduling
Protection Scheduling
Devices
Files
Modern OS

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 OS Strategies
 Batch processing: non-interactive jobs with throughput
primary concern (max jobs/s)
 Timesharing: multiple interactive jobs, utilizes
multiprogramming, abstract (virtual) machine concept,
protection, security, optimize response time.
 Personal computers and workstations: commodity
hardware and software, interoperability, dedicated
systems
 Embedded: limited resources (power, memory, processor
speed), interact with other devices
 Real-time: timing constraints on computations, desire
deterministic behavior, scheduling algorithms
 Small communicating computers: form of embedded
system but may be more severe restrictions, multimedia
common (streaming media), non-traditional platforms
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 General Purpose Operating Systems
• We will spend the majority of the semester studying
what is classically known as a general purpose operating
system.
• Typified by desk-top and portable computing systems.
• Most mechanisms we cover will equally apply to all
types of operating systems
• We will also look at policies and mechanisms commonly
attributed to distributed and real-time operating
systems

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 Distributed Operating Systems
• Controls and manages resources for a network of
autonomous computers
– manage both hardware and software resources
– behaves as a single monolithic system.
• User not aware of program or resource location
• Design issues same as traditional systems
• Practical issues:
– lack of shared memory
– lack of global clock (i.e. time reference)
– unpredictable communication delays.

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 Multiprocessor Operating Systems
• Consists of a set of processors that
– share a set of physical memory blocks
– share a common clock
– "share" over an interconnection network.
• Control and manage resources
– hardware and software resources
– viewed as a uniprocessor system.
• Design issues same as traditional system.
• Practical issues:
– increased complexity of synchronization, scheduling,
memory management, protection and security.

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 Database Operating Systems

• Database systems place increased demands on an

operating system to efficiently support:
– concept of a transaction
– manage large volumes of data
– concurrency control
– system failure control

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 Real-time Operating Systems
• Place application specific special requirements on an
operating system.
• Policies and mechanisms are geared to ensuring jobs
meet their deadlines.
• Problem is one of resource scheduling and overall
system utilization.

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