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Introduction to Operating Systems

Posted on Edited on In Valine:
This is the course note from Introduction to Operating Systems of Udacity

Introduction to Operating Systems

  • Topics to be covered in this lesson:
    • What is an OS (operating system)?
    • What are key components of an OS?
    • Design and implementation considerations of OSs

What is an Operating System?

  • An OS is a special piece of software that abstracts and arbitrates the use of a computer system
  • An OS is like a toy shop manager in that an OS:
    • Directs operational resources
    • Enforces working policies
    • Mitigates difficulty of complex tasks
  • By definition, an OS is a layer of systems software that:
    • Directly has privileged access to the underlying hardware
    • Hides the hardware complexity
    • Manages hardware on behalf of one of more applications according to some predefined polices
    • In addition, it ensures that applications are isolated and protected from one another

OS Elements

  • Abstractions:
    • Process, thread, file, socket, memory page
  • Mechanisms
    • Create, schedule, open, write, allocate
  • Policies
    • Least recently used (LRU), earliest deadline first (EDF)

Design Principles

  • Separation of mechanisms to policy:
    • Implement flexible mechanisms to support many policies
  • Optimize for common case:
    • Where will the OS be used?
    • What will the user want to execute on that machine?
    • What are the workload requirements?

OS Protection Boundary

  • Generally, applications operate in unprivileged mode (user level) while operating systems operate in privileged mode (kernel level)
  • Kernel level software is able to access hardware directly
  • User-kernel switch is supported by hardware
    • trap instructions
    • system call(open send malloc ...)
    • signals

Crossing The OS Boundary

System Call
  • Applications will need to utilize user-kernel transitions which is accomplished by hardware, this involves a number of instructions and switches locality
  • Switching locality will affect hardware cache (transitions are costly)
  • Hardware will set traps on illegal instructions and os can check what cause the trap
  • Cache
    • Because context switches will swap the data/addresses currently in cache, the performance of applications can benefit or suffer based on how a context switch changes what is in cache at the time they are accessing it.
    • A cache would be considered hot (fire) if an application is accessing the cache when it contains the data/addresses it needs.
    • Likewise, a cache would be considered cold (ice) if an application is accessing the cache when it does not contain the data/addresses it needs -- forcing it to retrieve data/addresses from main memory.

OS Services

An operating system provide applications with access to the underlying hardware by exporting a number of services. Thses services are directly linked to some of the components of the hardware.

  • process management
  • file management
  • device management
  • memory management
  • storage management
  • security management

Monolithic OS

  • Pros:
    • Everything included
    • Inlining, compile-time optimizations
  • Cons:
    • Customization, portability, manageability
    • Memory footprint
    • Performance

Modular OS

  • Pros:
    • Maintainability
    • Smaller footprint
    • Less resource needs
  • Cons:
    • Indirection can impact performance
    • Maintenance can still be an issue

Microkernel

  • Pros:
    • Size
    • Verifiability
  • Cons:
    • Portability
    • Complexity of software development
    • Cost of user/kernel crossing

Operating System Architecture

Linux

Linux Architecture

MacOS

Macos Architecture

Quiz

Quiz 1: Operating Systems Components

Which of the following are likely components of an operating system?

A:

file system (hides hardware complexity), device driver (makes decisions), scheduler (distributes processes).

Quiz 2: Operating Systems Components

For the following options, indicate if they are examples of abstraction or arbitration.

A:

  • Distributing memory between multiple processes (arbitration)
  • Supporting different types of speakers (abstraction)
  • Interchangeable access of hard disk or SSD (abstraction)

# Quiz 3: System Calls

On a 64-bit Linux-based OS, which system call is used to:

  • Send a signal to a process?
  • Set the group identity of a process?
  • Mount a file system?
  • Read/write system parameters

A:

The answers are respectively, - kill - setgid - mount - sysctl

Reference

  • https://github.com/stevenxchung/Introduction-to-Operating-Systems