Operating Systems
Senior Lecturer:
Dr. S.B
KISANJARA
What is an Operating System?
• “all the code that you didn’t write”
• the code that manages physical (hardware) resources
• provides users with “logical” well-behaved environment
• O.S. defines a set of logical resources (objects) and a set
of well-defined operations on those objects (i.e., an
interface to use those objects)
• provides mechanisms and policies for the control of
objects/resources
• controls how different users and programs interact
• without an O.S. there would be a lot more work to write and run
programs
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What resources need to be managed?
• the CPU (computation)
• primary memory
• secondary memory devices (disks, tapes, etc)
• networks
• input devices (keyboard, mouse)
• various I/O devices (printers, display, cameras,
speakers)
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What’s in an OS?
Application Quake Sql Server
Services
SYSTEM CALL API System Utils Shells Windowing & graphics
Naming Access Control Windowing & Gfx
Networking Virtual Memory
Machine
Independent File System Process Management
Services Generic I/O
Device Drivers Memory Management
MD API
Machine Dependent Interrupts, Cache, Physical Memory, TLB, Hardware Devices
Services
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Logical OS Structure
The OS is Everywhere
main(int argc, char **argv) • Edit
{ int fd = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY); • Compile
if (fd < 0) {
fprintf(stderr, “Failed to open\n”); • Run/Create Process
exit(-1); • Invoke main
}
while (1) { • Open file
if (read(fd, &c, sizeof c) != 1) – check access
exit(-1);
– cache
putc( c )
} – read character
} • Write character
• Terminate process on EOF or Err
% cc main.c
% ./a.out /tmp/foo.bar
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Major issues in Operating Systems
• structure -- how is an operating system organized?
• sharing -- how are resources shared among users
• naming -- how are resources named (by users or programs)
• protection -- how is one user/program protected from
another
• security -- how to restrict the flow of information
• performance -- why is it so slow?
• reliability and fault tolerance -- when something goes wrong
• extensibility -- how do we add new features?
• communication -- how and with whom can we communicate
(exchange information)
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Major issues in OS (2)
• concurrency -- how are parallel activities created and
controlled?
• scale and growth -- what happens as demands or resources
increase?
• persistence -- how to make data last longer than programs
• compatibility -- can we ever do anything new?
• distribution -- accessing the world of information
• accounting -- who pays the bills, and how do we control
resource usage?
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A brief history of operating systems
• “in the beginning”, the OS was just code to which you
linked your program, loaded the whole thing into
memory, and ran your program; basically, just a
run-time library
• simple batch systems were first real operating systems:
• os was stored in part of primary memory
• it loaded a single job (from card reader) into memory
• ran that job (printed its output, etc.)
• loaded the next job...
• control cards in the input file told the os what to do
• Spooling and buffering allowed jobs to be read ahead of
time onto tape/disk or into memory.
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Multiprogramming
• Multiprogramming systems provided
increased utilization
• keeps multiple runnable jobs loaded in memory
• overlaps I/O processing of a job with computes of
another
• benefits from I/O devices that can operate
asynchronously
• requires the use of interrupts and DMA
• tries to optimize throughput at the cost of response
time
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Timesharing
• Timesharing supported interactive use of
• each user feels as if he/she has the entire machine (at
least late at night!)
• timesharing tries to optimize response time at the cost
of throughput
• based on time-slicing -- dividing CPU equally among
the users
• permitted active viewing, editing, debugging,
participation of users in the execution process
• MIT Multics system (mid-late 1960s) was first large
timesharing system
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Distributed Operating Systems
• distributed systems facilitate use of geographically
distributed resources
– machines connected by wires
• supports communication between parts of a job or
different jobs
– interprocess communication
• sharing of distributed resources, hardware and
software
– resource utilization and access
• permits some parallelism, but speedup is not the issue
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Parallel Operating Systems
• Support parallel applications wishing to get speedup of
computationally complex tasks
• Needs basic primitives for dividing one task into
multiple parallel activities
• Supports efficient communication between those
activities
• Supports synchronization of activities to coordinate
sharing of information
• It’s common now to use networks of high-performance
PCs/workstations as a parallel computer
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Embedded Operating Systems
• The decreased cost of processing makes computers
ubiquitous. Each “embedded” application needs its
own OS or control software:
– cell phones
– PDAs (Palm Pilot, etc.)
– “network terminals” (internet interfaces)
• In the future, your house will have 100s of these things
in it (if it doesn’t already)
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CSE 451
• In this class we will learn:
• what are the parts of an O.S.
• how is the o.s. and each sub-part structured
• what are the important interfaces
• what are the important policies
• what algorithms are typically used
• We will do this through reading, lectures, and a project.
• You will need to keep up with all three of these.
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Review Questions
for Reinforcement
• 1. What do you understand by the term
Operating System?
• 2. What does multiprogramming mean?
• 3.What do you mean by System call?
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