Operating Systems 2020

Module– 5b Case Study: The Linux Operating System:

o Linux history;
o Design principles;
o Kernel modules;
o Process management;
o Scheduling;
o Memory management;
o File systems,
o Input and output;
o Inter-process communication.

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This chapter is
 To explore the history of the UNIX operating system from which Linux is derived and the
principles which Linux is designed upon
 To examine the Linux process model and illustrate how Linux schedules processes and
provides inter-process communication
 To look at memory management in Linux
 To explore how Linux implements file systems and manages I/O devices

5.1 Linux History

 Linux is a modern, free operating system based on UNIX standards
 First developed as a small but self-contained kernel in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, with the
major design goal of UNIX compatibility
 Its history has been one of collaboration by many users from all around the world,
corresponding almost exclusively over the Internet
 It has been designed to run efficiently and reliably on common PC hardware, but also runs
on a variety of other platforms
 The core Linux operating system kernel is entirely original, but it can run much existing free
UNIX software, resulting in an entire UNIX-compatible operating system free from
proprietary code
 Many, varying Linux Distributions including the kernel, applications, and management
tools
 Version 0.01 (May 1991) had no networking, ran only on 80386compatible Intel pr Many,
varying Linux Distributions including the kernel, applications, and management tools
processors and on PC hardware, had extremely limited device-drive support, and supported
only the Minix file system
 Linux 1.0 (March 1994) included these new features: Support for UNIX’s standard TCP/IP
networking protocols
5.2 Design Principles
 Linux is a multiuser, multitasking system with a full set of UNIX compatible tools. Its file
system adheres to traditional UNIX semantics, and it fully implements the standard UNIX
networking model
 Main design goals are speed, efficiency, and standardization

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 Linux is designed to be compliant with the relevant POSIX documents; at least two Linux
distributions have achieved official POSIX certification
 The Linux programming interface adheres to the SVR4 UNIX semantics, rather than to BSD
behavior Like most UNIX implementations

5.3 Components of a Linux System

 Like most UNIX implementations, Linux is composed of three main bodies of code; the
most important distinction between the kernel and all other components
 The kernel is responsible for maintaining the important abstractions of the operating system
o Kernel code executes in kernel mode with full access to all the physical resources of
the computer
o All kernel code and data structures are kept in the same single address space
 The system libraries define a standard set of functions through which applications interact
with the kernel, and which implement much of the operating-system functionality that does
not need the full privileges of kernel code
 The system utilities perform individual specialized management tasks
5.4 Kernel Modules
 Sections of kernel code that can be compiled, loaded, and unloaded independent of the rest
of the kernel
 A kernel module may typically implement a device driver, a file system, or a networking
protocol
 The module interface allows third parties to write and distribute, on their own terms, device
drivers or file systems that could not be distributed under the GPL

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 Kernel modules allow a Linux system to be set up with a standard, minimal kernel, without
any extra device drivers built in
 Three components to Linux module support:
o module management
o driver registration
o conflict resolution
Module Management
 Supports loading modules into memory and letting them talk to the rest of the kernel
 Module loading is split into two separate sections:
o Managing sections of module code in kernel memory
o Handling symbols that modules are allowed to reference
 The module requestor manages loading requested, but currently unloaded, modules; it also
regularly queries the kernel to see whether a dynamically loaded module is still in use, and
will unload it when it is no longer actively needed
Driver Registration
 Allows modules to tell the rest of the kernel that a new driver has become available
 The kernel maintains dynamic tables of all known drivers, and provides a set of routines to
allow drivers to be added to or removed from these tables at any time
 Registration tables include the following items:
o Device drivers
o File systems
o Network protocols
o Binary format
Conflict Resolution
 A mechanism that allows different device drivers to reserve hardware resources and to
protect those resources from accidental use by another driver
 The conflict resolution module aims to:
o Prevent modules from clashing over access to hardware resources
o Prevent autoprobes from interfering with existing device drivers
o Resolve conflicts with multiple drivers trying to access the same hardware

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5.5 Process Management
 UNIX process management separates the creation of processes and the running of a new
program into two distinct operations.
o The fork system call creates a new process
o A new program is run after a call to execve
 Under UNIX, a process encompasses all the information that the operating system must
maintain t track the context of a single execution of a single program
 Under Linux, process properties fall into three groups: the process’s identity, environment,
and context
Process Identity
 Process ID (PID). The unique identifier for the process; used to specify processes to the
operating system when an application makes a system call to signal, modify, or wait for
another process
 Credentials. Each process must have an associated user ID and one or more group IDs that
determine the process’s rights to access system resources and files
 Personality. Not traditionally found on UNIX systems, but under Linux each process has an
associated personality identifier that can slightly modify the semantics of certain system
calls
o Used primarily by emulation libraries to request that system calls be compatible with
certain specific flavors of UNIX
Process Environment
 The process’s environment is inherited from its parent, and is composed of two null-
terminated vectors:
o The argument vector lists the command-line arguments used to invoke the running
program; conventionally starts with the name of the program itself
o The environment vector is a list of “NAME=VALUE” pairs that associates named
environment variables with arbitrary textual values
 Passing environment variables among processes and inheriting variables by a process’s
children are flexible means of passing information to components of the user-mode system
software
 The environment-variable mechanism provides a customization of the operating system that
can be set on a per-process basis, rather than being configured for the system as a whole

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Process Context
 The (constantly changing) state of a running program at any point in time
 The scheduling context is the most important part of the process context; it is the
information that the scheduler needs to suspend and restart the process
 The kernel maintains accounting information about the resources currently being consumed
by each process, and the total resources consumed by the process in its lifetime so far
 The file table is an array of pointers to kernel file structures
o When making file I/O system calls, processes refer to files by their index into this
table
 Whereas the file table lists the existing open files, the
file-system context applies to requests to open new files
 The current root and default directories to be used for new file searches are stored here
 The signal-handler table defines the routine in the process’s address space to be called
when specific signals arrive
 The virtual-memory context of a process describes the full contents of the its private
address space
Processes and Threads
 Linux uses the same internal representation for processes and threads; a thread is simply a
new process that happens to share the same address space as its parent
 A distinction is only made when a new thread is created by the clone system call
o fork creates a new process with its own entirely new process context
o clone creates a new process with its own identity, but that is allowed to share the
data structures of its parent
 Using clone gives an application fine-grained control over exactly what is shared between
two threads
5.6 Scheduling
 The job of allocating CPU time to different tasks within an operating system
 While scheduling is normally thought of as the running and interrupting of processes, in
Linux, scheduling also includes the running of the various kernel tasks
 Running kernel tasks encompasses both tasks that are requested by a running process and
tasks that execute internally on behalf of a device driver
 As of 2.5, new scheduling algorithm – preemptive, priority-based
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o Real-time range
o nice value

Relationship between Priorities and Time-slice Length

List of Tasks Indexed by Priority

Kernel Synchronization
 A request for kernel-mode execution can occur in two ways:
o A running program may request an operating system service, either explicitly via a
system call, or implicitly, for example, when a page fault occurs
o A device driver may deliver a hardware interrupt that causes the CPU to start
executing a kernel-defined handler for that interrupt

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 Kernel synchronization requires a framework that will allow the kernel’s critical sections to
run without interruption by another critical section
 Linux uses two techniques to protect critical sections:
1. Normal kernel code is nonpreemptible (until 2.4)
– when a time interrupt is received while a process is
executing a kernel system service routine, the kernel’s
need_resched flag is set so that the scheduler will run
once the system call has completed and control is
about to be returned to user mode
2. The second technique applies to critical sections that occur in an interrupt service routines
– By using the processor’s interrupt control hardware to disable interrupts during a critical
section, the kernel guarantees that it can proceed without the risk of concurrent access of shared
data structures
 To avoid performance penalties, Linux’s kernel uses a synchronization architecture that
allows long critical sections to run without having interrupts disabled for the critical
section’s entire duration
 Interrupt service routines are separated into a top half and a bottom half.
o The top half is a normal interrupt service routine, and runs with recursive interrupts
disabled
o The bottom half is run, with all interrupts enabled, by a miniature scheduler that
ensures that bottom halves never interrupt themselves
o This architecture is completed by a mechanism for disabling selected bottom halves
while executing normal, foreground kernel code
Interrupt Protection Levels

 Each level may be interrupted by code running at a higher level, but will never be
interrupted by code running at the same or a lower level

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 User processes can always be preempted by another process when a time-sharing scheduling
interrupt occurs
5.7 Process Scheduling
 Linux uses two process-scheduling algorithms:
o A time-sharing algorithm for fair preemptive scheduling between multiple processes
o A real-time algorithm for tasks where absolute priorities are more important than
fairness
 A process’s scheduling class defines which algorithm to apply
 For time-sharing processes, Linux uses a prioritized, credit based algorithm
o The crediting rule
credits
credits :  priority
2
factors in both the process’s history and its priority
o This crediting system automatically prioritizes interactive or I/O-bound processes
 Linux implements the FIFO and round-robin real-time scheduling classes; in both cases,
each process has a priority in addition to its scheduling class
o The scheduler runs the process with the highest priority; for equal-priority processes,
it runs the process waiting the longest
o FIFO processes continue to run until they either exit or block
o A round-robin process will be preempted after a while and moved to the end of the
scheduling queue, so that round-robing processes of equal priority automatically
time-share between themselves
Symmetric Multiprocessing
 Linux 2.0 was the first Linux kernel to support SMP hardware; separate processes or threads
can execute in parallel on separate processors
 To preserve the kernel’s nonpreemptible synchronization requirements, SMP imposes the
restriction, via a single kernel spinlock, that only one processor at a time may execute
kernel-mode code
5.8 Memory Management
 Linux’s physical memory-management system deals with allocating and freeing pages,
groups of pages, and small blocks of memory

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 It has additional mechanisms for handling virtual memory, memory mapped into the address
space of running processes
 Splits memory into 3 different zones due to hardware characteristics
Relationship of Zones and Physical Addresses on 80x86

Splitting of Memory in a Buddy Heap

Managing Physical Memory

 The page allocator allocates and frees all physical pages; it can allocate ranges of
physically-contiguous pages on request
 The allocator uses a buddy-heap algorithm to keep track of available physical pages
o Each allocatable memory region is paired with an adjacent partner
o Whenever two allocated partner regions are both freed up they are combined to form
a larger region
o If a small memory request cannot be satisfied by allocating an existing small free
region, then a larger free region will be subdivided into two partners to satisfy the
request
 Memory allocations in the Linux kernel occur either statically (drivers reserve a contiguous
area of memory during system boot time) or dynamically (via the page allocator)
 Also uses slab allocator for kernel memory
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21.07

Virtual Memory
 The VM system maintains the address space visible to each process: It creates pages of
virtual memory on demand, and manages the loading of those pages from disk or their
swapping back out to disk as required
 The VM manager maintains two separate views of a process’s address space:
o A logical view describing instructions concerning the layout of the address space
 The address space consists of a set of nonoverlapping regions, each
representing a continuous, page-aligned subset of the address space
o A physical view of each address space which is stored in the hardware page tables
for the process
 Virtual memory regions are characterized by:
 The backing store, which describes from where the pages for a region come; regions are
usually backed by a file or by nothing (demand-zero memory)
 The region’s reaction to writes (page sharing or copy-on-write)
 The kernel creates a new virtual address space
1. When a process runs a new program with the exec system call
2. Upon creation of a new process by the fork system call
 On executing a new program, the process is given a new, completely empty virtual-address
space; the program-loading routines populate the address space with virtual-memory regions
 Creating a new process with fork involves creating a complete copy of the existing
process’s virtual address space

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 The kernel copies the parent process’s VMA descriptors, then creates a new set of page
tables for the child
 The parent’s page tables are copied directly into the child’s, with the reference count of each
page covered being incremented
 After the fork, the parent and child share the same physical pages of memory in their
address spaces
 The VM paging system relocates pages of memory from physical memory out to disk when
the memory is needed for something else
 The VM paging system can be divided into two sections:
 The pageout-policy algorithm decides which pages to write out to disk, and when
 The paging mechanism actually carries out the transfer, and pages data back into physical
memory as needed
 The Linux kernel reserves a constant, architecture-dependent region of the virtual address
space of every process for its own internal use
 This kernel virtual-memory area contains two regions:
 A static area that contains page table references to every available physical page of memory
in the system, so that there is a simple translation from physical to virtual addresses when
running kernel code
 The reminder of the reserved section is not reserved for any specific purpose; its page-table
entries can be modified to point to any other areas of memory

Executing and Loading User Programs

 Linux maintains a table of functions for loading programs; it gives each function the
opportunity to try loading the given file when an exec system call is made
 The registration of multiple loader routines allows Linux to support both the ELF and a.out
binary formats
 Initially, binary-file pages are mapped into virtual memory
o Only when a program tries to access a given page will a page fault result in that page
being loaded into physical memory
 An ELF-format binary file consists of a header followed by several page-aligned sections
o The ELF loader works by reading the header and mapping the sections of the file
into separate regions of virtual memory

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Memory Layout for ELF Programs

Static and Dynamic Linking

 A program whose necessary library functions are embedded directly in the program’s
executable binary file is statically linked to its libraries
 The main disadvantage of static linkage is that every program generated must contain copies
of exactly the same common system library functions
 Dynamic linking is more efficient in terms of both physical memory and disk-space usage
because it loads the system libraries into memory only once
5.9 File Systems
 To the user, Linux’s file system appears as a hierarchical directory tree obeying UNIX
semantics
 Internally, the kernel hides implementation details and manages the multiple different file
systems via an abstraction layer, that is, the virtual file system (VFS)
 The Linux VFS is designed around object-oriented principles and is composed of two
components:
o A set of definitions that define what a file object is allowed to look like
 The inode-object and the file-object structures represent individual files
 the file system object represents an entire file system
o A layer of software to manipulate those objects
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The Linux Ext2fs File System
 Ext2fs uses a mechanism similar to that of BSD Fast File System (ffs) for locating data
blocks belonging to a specific file
 The main differences between ext2fs and ffs concern their disk allocation policies
o In ffs, the disk is allocated to files in blocks of 8Kb, with blocks being subdivided
into fragments of 1Kb to store small files or partially filled blocks at the end of a file
o Ext2fs does not use fragments; it performs its allocations in smaller units
 The default block size on ext2fs is 1Kb, although 2Kb and 4Kb blocks are
also supported
o Ext2fs uses allocation policies designed to place logically adjacent blocks of a file
into physically adjacent blocks on disk, so that it can submit an I/O request for
several disk blocks as a single operation

The Linux Proc File System

 The proc file system does not store data, rather, its contents are computed on demand
according to user file I/O requests
 proc must implement a directory structure, and the file contents within; it must then define a
unique and persistent inode number for each directory and files it contains
o It uses this inode number to identify just what operation is required when a user tries
to read from a particular file inode or perform a lookup in a particular directory
inode

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o When data is read from one of these files, proc collects the appropriate information,
formats it into text form and places it into the requesting process’s read buffer
5.10 Input and Output
 The Linux device-oriented file system accesses disk storage through two caches:
o Data is cached in the page cache, which is unified with the virtual memory system
o Metadata is cached in the buffer cache, a separate cache indexed by the physical disk
block
 Linux splits all devices into three classes:
o block devices allow random access to completely independent, fixed size blocks of
data
o character devices include most other devices; they don’t need to support the
functionality of regular files
o network devices are interfaced via the kernel’s networking subsystem

Device-Driver Block Structure

Block Devices
 Provide the main interface to all disk devices in a system
 The block buffer cache serves two main purposes:
o it acts as a pool of buffers for active I/O
o it serves as a cache for completed I/O
 The request manager manages the reading and writing of buffer contents to and from a
block device driver

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Character Devices
 A device driver which does not offer random access to fixed blocks of data
 A character device driver must register a set of functions which implement the driver’s
various file I/O operations
 The kernel performs almost no preprocessing of a file read or write request to a character
device, but simply passes on the request to the device
 The main exception to this rule is the special subset of character device drivers which
implement terminal devices, for which the kernel maintains a standard interface

5.11 Interprocess Communication

 Like UNIX, Linux informs processes that an event has occurred via signals
 There is a limited number of signals, and they cannot carry information: Only the fact that a
signal occurred is available to a process
 The Linux kernel does not use signals to communicate with processes with are running in
kernel mode, rather, communication within the kernel is accomplished via scheduling states
and wait.queue structures
Passing Data Between Processes
 The pipe mechanism allows a child process to inherit a communication channel to its parent,
data written to one end of the pipe can be read a the other
 Shared memory offers an extremely fast way of communicating; any data written by one
process to a shared memory region can be read immediately by any other process that has
mapped that region into its address space
 To obtain synchronization, however, shared memory must be used in conjunction with
another Interprocess-communication mechanism
Shared Memory Object
 The shared-memory object acts as a backing store for shared-memory regions in the same
way as a file can act as backing store for a memory-mapped memory region
 Shared-memory mappings direct page faults to map in pages from a persistent shared-
memory object
 Shared-memory objects remember their contents even if no processes are currently mapping
them into virtual memory

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Network Structure
 Networking is a key area of functionality for Linux.
o It supports the standard Internet protocols for UNIX to UNIX communications
o It also implements protocols native to nonUNIX operating systems, in particular,
protocols used on PC networks, such as Appletalk and IPX
 Internally, networking in the Linux kernel is implemented by three layers of software:
o The socket interface
o Protocol drivers
o Network device drivers
 The most important set of protocols in the Linux networking system is the internet protocol
suite
o It implements routing between different hosts anywhere on the network
o On top of the routing protocol are built the UDP, TCP and ICMP protocols
Security
 The pluggable authentication modules (PAM) system is available under Linux
 PAM is based on a shared library that can be used by any system component that needs to
authenticate users
 Access control under UNIX systems, including Linux, is performed through the use of
unique numeric identifiers (uid and gid)
 Access control is performed by assigning objects a protections mask, which specifies which
access modes—read, write, or execute—are to be granted to processes with owner, group, or
world access
 Linux augments the standard UNIX setuid mechanism in two ways:
n It implements the POSIX specification’s saved user-id mechanism, which allows a
process to repeatedly drop and reacquire its effective uid
n It has added a process characteristic that grants just a subset of the rights of the
effective uid
 Linux provides another mechanism that allows a client to selectively pass access to a single
file to some server process without granting it any other privileges.

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