Chapter 21: Windows 10

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Chapter 21: Windows
 History
 Design Principles
 System Components
 Terminal Services and Fast User Switching
 File System
 Networking
 Programmer Interface

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Objectives
 Explore the principles upon which Windows 10 is designed and the
specific components involved in the system
 Provide a detailed explanation of the Windows 10 file system
 Illustrate the networking protocols supported in Windows 10
 Describe the interface available in Windows 10 to system and
application programmers
 Describe the important algorithms implemented in Windows 10

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 History
 In 1988, Microsoft decided to develop a “new technology” (NT)
portable operating system that supported both the OS/2 and POSIX
APIs
 Originally, NT was supposed to use the OS/2 API as its native
environment but during development NT was changed to use the
Win32 API, reflecting the popularity of Windows 3.0.
 Many versions of Windows along the way, XP, Vista, 7, 8, and now 10
 Many older versions still in use, less secure, some unpatched

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 Windows 10
 32- and 64-bit preemptive multitasking operating system for Intel
microprocessors
 Key goals for the system:
• portability
• security
• POSIX compliance
• multiprocessor support
• extensibility
• international support
• compatibility with MS-DOS and MS-Windows applications
 Uses a micro-kernel architecture
 Several versions with different prices, for devices/laptops/desktops and
servers
 Win 10 has an app store, Windows Desktop Bridge to run older binaries,
Pico Providers replacing the old multiple subsystem concept, Hyper-V
virtualization, multiuser, distributed services, remote GUI, and other
advanced features

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 Design Principles
 Security -
• Access control lists (ACLs) – both attribute-based and claim-
based
• Rudimentary capabilities functionally called integrity levels
• File system and communication encryption
• Exploit mitigations – address-space layout randomization
(ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Control-Flow
Guard (CFG), and Arbitrary Code Guard (ACG)
• Several digital signature facilities
• Device Guard option for fine grain control over what signers
code is allowed on the system

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 Design Principles (Cont.)
 Extensibility — layered architecture
• Remote procedure calls (RPCs)
• Advanced local procedure calls (ALPCs)
 Portability — Windows 10 can be moved from one hardware
architecture to another with relatively few changes
• Written in C and C++
• Processor-specific portions are written in assembly language
for a given processor architecture (small amount of such code).
• Platform-dependent code is isolated in a dynamic link library
(DLL) called the “hardware abstraction layer” (HAL)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Design Principles (Cont.)
 Reliability — Windows 10 uses hardware protection for virtual
memory, and software protection mechanisms for operating system
resources
 Compatibility — applications that follow the IEEE 1003.1 (POSIX)
standard can be complied to run on 10 without changing the source
code
 Performance — Windows 10 subsystems can communicate with one
another via high-performance message passing
• Preemption of low priority threads enables the system to respond
quickly to external events
• Designed for symmetrical multiprocessing
 International support — supports different locales via the national
language support (NLS) API
 Energy efficiency – for portable devices, etc, includes dynamic tick
feature, process lifetime management, desktop activity monitor,
connected standby

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 Windows 10 Architecture
 Layered system of module
 Protected mode — hardware abstraction layer (HAL), kernel,
executive
 User mode — collection of subsystems
• Environmental subsystems emulate different operating systems
• Protection subsystems provide security functions

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 Depiction of 10 Architecture

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 System Components
 Layered system of modules operating at specific privilege layers
 Kernel and user mode of course
 Virtual Trust Levels (VTLs) option implemented by Hyper-V
virtualization
• Enables virtual secure mode
• Normal World (VTL 0) and Secure World (VTL 1)
• Within each world are user and kernel modes
• Secure world has a secure kernel and executive and a collection of
trustlets
• Bottommost layer runs in special processor mode (VMX Root
Mode on Intel) including Hyper-V hypervisor, creating hardware-
based normal-to-secure-world boundary

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 System Components — Kernel
 Foundation for the executive and the subsystems
 Never paged out of memory; execution is never preempted
 Four main responsibilities:
• thread scheduling
• interrupt and exception handling
• low-level processor synchronization
• recovery after a power failure
 Kernel is object-oriented, uses two sets of objects
• dispatcher objects control dispatching and synchronization
(events, mutants, mutexes, semaphores, threads and timers)
• control objects (asynchronous procedure calls, interrupts, power
notify, power status, process and profile objects)
 VSM Enclaves allow valid signed third-party code to perform crypto
calculations

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 Kernel — Process and Threads
 The process has a virtual memory address space, information (such
as a base priority), and an affinity for one or more processors
 Threads are the unit of execution scheduled by the kernel’s dispatcher
 Each thread has its own state, including a priority, processor affinity,
and accounting information
 A thread can be one of eight states: initializing, ready, deferred-ready,
standby, running, waiting, transition, and terminated
 Each thread has two modes of execution: user-mode thread (UT) and
kernel-mode thread (KT)
• Each has two stacks, one for each mode
• Kernel layer runs trap handler to switch stacks and change CPU
mode

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 Kernel — Scheduling
 The dispatcher uses a 32-level priority scheme to determine the order
of thread execution.
• Priorities are divided into two classes
 The real-time class contains threads with priorities ranging from
16 to 31
 The variable class contains threads having priorities from 0 to
15
 Characteristics of Windows 10’s priority strategy
• Trends to give very good response times to interactive threads that
are using the mouse and windows
• Enables I/O-bound threads to keep the I/O devices busy
• Complete-bound threads soak up the spare CPU cycles in the
background

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Kernel — Scheduling (Cont.)
 Scheduling can occur when a thread enters the ready or wait state,
when a thread terminates, or when an application changes a thread’s
priority or processor affinity
 Real-time threads are given preferential access to the CPU; but 10
does not guarantee that a real-time thread will start to execute within
any particular time limit
• This is known as soft realtime

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 Windows x86 Interrupt Request Levels

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 Kernel — Trap Handling
 The kernel provides trap handling when exceptions and interrupts are
generated by hardware of software
 Exceptions that cannot be handled by the trap handler are handled by
the kernel's exception dispatcher
 The interrupt dispatcher in the kernel handles interrupts by calling
either an interrupt service routine (such as in a device driver) or an
internal kernel routine
 The kernel uses spin locks that reside in global memory to achieve
multiprocessor mutual exclusion

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 Executive — Object Manager
 Windows 7 uses objects for all its services and entities; the object
manger supervises the use of all the objects
• Generates an object handle
• Checks security
• Keeps track of which processes are using each object
 Objects are manipulated by a standard set of methods, namely create,
open, close, delete, query name, parse and security.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Executive — Naming Objects
 The Windows 7 executive allows almost any object to be given a
name, which may be either permanent or temporary
• Exceptions are process, thread and some others object types
 Object names are structured like file path names in MS-DOS and
UNIX
 Windows 7 implements a symbolic link object, which is similar to
symbolic links in UNIX that allow multiple nicknames or aliases to refer
to the same file
 A process gets an object handle by creating an object by opening an
existing one, by receiving a duplicated handle from another process, or
by inheriting a handle from a parent process
 Each object is protected by an access control list

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Executive — Virtual Memory Manager
 The design of the VM manager assumes that the underlying hardware
supports virtual to physical mapping a paging mechanism, transparent
cache coherence on multiprocessor systems, and virtual addressing
aliasing.
 The VM manager in Windows 10 uses a page-based management
scheme with a whatever page sizes are supported by hardware (4 KB,
2MB, 1GB)
 The Windows 10 VM manager uses a two step process to allocate
memory
• The first step reserves a portion of the process’s address space
• The second step commits the allocation by assigning space in the
system’s paging file(s)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Virtual-Memory Layout

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 Virtual Memory Manager (Cont.)
 The virtual address translation in Windows 10 uses several data
structures
• Each process has a page directory that contains 1024 page
directory entries of size 4 bytes
• Each page directory entry points to a page table which contains
1024 page table entries (PTEs) of size 4 bytes
• Each PTE points to a 4 KB page frame in physical memory
 A 10-bit integer can represent all the values form 0 to 1023, therefore,
can select any entry in the page directory, or in a page table
 This property is used when translating a virtual address pointer to a
bye address in physical memory
 A page can be in one of six states: valid, zeroed, free standby,
modified and bad

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 Virtual-to-Physical Address
Translation on IA-32
 2 bits index into four PDEs, 9 bits for page directory entry, 9 bits
for page table entry, and 12 bits for byte offset in page

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 Page File Page-Table Entry

V=0, T=0, P=0

5 bits for page protection, 32 bits for page-file offset, frame
address, 4 bits to select a paging file, and 20 bits for additional
bookkeeping

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 Executive — Process Manager
 Provides services for creating, deleting, and using threads and
processes
 Issues such as parent/child relationships or process hierarchies are
left to the particular environmental subsystem that owns the process
 Processes represented by job object
 Docker container support via job objects called silos

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 Executive —
Local Procedure Call Facility

 The LPC passes requests and results between client and server
processes within a single machine
 When a LPC channel is created, one of three types of message
passing techniques must be specified
• First type is suitable for small messages, up to 256 bytes; port's
message queue is used as intermediate storage, and the
messages are copied from one process to the other
• Second type avoids copying large messages by pointing to a
shared memory section object created for the channel
• Third method, called quick LPC was used by graphical display
portions of the Win32 subsystem

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 Executive — I/O Manager
 The I/O manager is responsible for
• file systems
• cache management
• device drivers
• network drivers
 Keeps track of which installable file systems are loaded, and manages
buffers for I/O requests
 Works with VM Manager to provide memory-mapped file I/O
 Controls the Windows 10 cache manager, which handles caching for
the entire I/O system
 Supports both synchronous and asynchronous operations, provides
time outs for drivers, and has mechanisms for one driver to call another

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 File I/O

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 Executive — Security Reference Monitor

 The object-oriented nature of Windows 10 enables the use of a

uniform mechanism to perform runtime access validation and audit
checks for every entity in the system
 Whenever a process opens a handle to an object, the security
reference monitor checks the process’s security token and the
object’s access control list to see whether the process has the
necessary rights

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 Executive – Plug-and-Play Manager

 Plug-and-Play (PnP) manager is used to recognize and adapt to

changes in the hardware configuration
 When new devices are added (for example, PCI or USB), the PnP
manager loads the appropriate driver
 The manager also keeps track of the resources used by each device

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 Executive – Power Manager

 Detects current power conditions

 Puts system to sleep, hibernation
 Processor power manager for core parking, CPU throttling and
boosting, etc.
 Device state management

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 Executive – Registry

 Configuration information kept in internal repositories called hives

 Managed by configuration manager called registry
 Separate hives for system information, each user’s preferences,
software information, security and boot options
 Windows creates system restore point before making registry
changes to be able to recover previous registry if something goes
wrong

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 Executive – Booting

 Windows starts booting via BIOS firmware

 UEFI includes Secure Boot feature that provides integrity
checking via digital signature verification of all firmware and
boot-time components
 Firmware does Power-on self-test (POST)
 If machine is hibernating, state restored via winresume.efi
program
 Kernel initializes, starts several processes including idle, system
process, secure system process and session manager
subsystem (SMSS)

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 File System

 The fundamental structure of the Windows 10 file system (NTFS) is a

volume
• Created by the Windows 10 disk administrator utility
• Based on a logical disk partition
• May occupy a portions of a disk, an entire disk, or span across
several disks
 All metadata, such as information about the volume, is stored in a
regular file
 NTFS uses clusters as the underlying unit of disk allocation
• A cluster is a number of disk sectors that is a power of two
• Because the cluster size is smaller than for the 16-bit FAT file
system, the amount of internal fragmentation is reduced

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 File System — Internal Layout

 NTFS uses logical cluster numbers (LCNs) as disk addresses

 A file in NTFS is not a simple byte stream, as in MS-DOS or UNIX,
rather, it is a structured object consisting of attributes
 Every file in NTFS is described by one or more records in an array
stored in a special file called the Master File Table (MFT)
 Each file on an NTFS volume has a unique ID called a file reference
• 64-bit quantity that consists of a 48-bit file number and a 16-bit
sequence number
• Can be used to perform internal consistency checks
 The NTFS name space is organized by a hierarchy of directories; the
index root contains the top level of the B+ tree

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 File System — Recovery

 All file system data structure updates are performed inside

transactions that are logged
• Before a data structure is altered, the transaction writes a log
record that contains redo and undo information
• After the data structure has been changed, a commit record is
written to the log to signify that the transaction succeeded
• After a crash, the file system data structures can be restored to a
consistent state by processing the log records

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 File System — Recovery (Cont.)

 This scheme does not guarantee that all the user file data can be
recovered after a crash, just that the file system data structures (the
metadata files) are undamaged and reflect some consistent state prior
to the crash.
 The log is stored in the third metadata file at the beginning of the
volume.
 The logging functionality is provided by the Windows 7 log file service.

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 File System — Security

 Security of an NTFS volume is derived from the Windows 7 object

model
 Each file object has a security descriptor attribute stored in this MFT
record
 This attribute contains the access token of the owner of the file, and an
access control list that states the access privileges that are granted to
each user that has access to the file

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 Volume Management
and Fault Tolerance

 FtDisk, the fault tolerant disk driver for Windows 7, provides several
ways to combine multiple SCSI disk drives into one logical volume
 Logically concatenate multiple disks to form a large logical volume, a
volume set
 Interleave multiple physical partitions in round-robin fashion to form a
stripe set (also called RAID level 0, or “disk striping”)
• Variation: stripe set with parity, or RAID level 5
 Disk mirroring, or RAID level 1, is a robust scheme that uses a mirror
set — two equally sized partitions on tow disks with identical data
contents
 To deal with disk sectors that go bad, FtDisk, uses a hardware
technique called sector sparing and NTFS uses a software technique
called cluster remapping

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 File System — Compression

 To compress a file, NTFS divides the file’s data into compression

units, which are blocks of 16 contiguous clusters
 For sparse files, NTFS uses another technique to save space
• Clusters that contain all zeros are not actually allocated or stored
on disk
• Instead, gaps are left in the sequence of virtual cluster numbers
stored in the MFT entry for the file
• When reading a file, if a gap in the virtual cluster numbers is
found, NTFS just zero-fills that portion of the caller’s buffer

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 File System — Reparse Points

 A reparse point returns an error code when accessed

 The reparse data tells the I/O manager what to do next
 Reparse points can be used to provide the functionality of
UNIX mounts
 Reparse points can also be used to access files that have
been moved to offline storage

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 Networking

 Windows 10 supports both peer-to-peer and client/server networking; it

also has facilities for network management
 To describe networking in Windows 10, we refer to two of the internal
networking interfaces:
• NDIS (Network Device Interface Specification) — Separates
network adapters from the transport protocols so that either can be
changed without affecting the other
• TDI (Transport Driver Interface) — Enables any session layer
component to use any available transport mechanism
 Windows 7 implements transport protocols as drivers that can be
loaded and unloaded from the system dynamically

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 Networking — Protocols

 The server message block (SMB) protocol is used to send I/O requests
over the network. It has four message types:
1. Session control
2. File
3. Printer
4. Message
 The network basic Input/Output system (NetBIOS) is a hardware
abstraction interface for networks
• Used to:
 Establish logical names on the network
 Establish logical connections of sessions between two logical
names on the network
 Support reliable data transfer for a session via NetBIOS
requests or SMBs

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.50 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Networking — Protocols (Cont.)

 Windows uses the TCP/IP Internet protocol version 4 and version 6 to

connect to a wide variety of operating systems and hardware platforms
 PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) is used to communicate
between Remote Access Server modules running on Windows
machines that are connected over the Internet
 The Data Link Control protocol (DLC) is used to access IBM
mainframes and HP printers that are directly connected to the network
(possible on 32-bit only versions using unsigned drivers)

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 Access to a Remote File

 The application calls the I/O manager to request that a file be opened
(we assume that the file name is in the standard UNC format)
 The I/O manager builds an I/O request packet
 The I/O manager recognizes that the access is for a remote file, and
calls a driver called a Multiple Universal Naming Convention Provider
(MUP)
 The MUP sends the I/O request packet asynchronously to all
registered redirectors
 A redirector that can satisfy the request responds to the MUP
• To avoid asking all the redirectors the same question in the future,
the MUP uses a cache to remember with redirector can handle this
file

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 Access to a Remote File (Cont.)

 The redirector sends the network request to the remote system

 The remote system network drivers receive the request and pass it to
the server driver
 The server driver hands the request to the proper local file system
driver
 The proper device driver is called to access the data
 The results are returned to the server driver, which sends the data
back to the requesting redirector

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 Networking — Domains

 Windows uses the concept of a domain to manage global access rights

within groups
 A domain is a group of machines running Windows that share a
common security policy and user database
 Windows provides three models of setting up trust relationships
• One way, A trusts B
• Two way, transitive, A trusts B, B trusts C so A, B, C trust each
other
• Crosslink – allows authentication to bypass hierarchy to cut down
on authentication traffic

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 Name Resolution in TCP/IP Networks

 On an IP network, name resolution is the process of converting a

computer name to an IP address
• e.g., www.bell-labs.com resolves to 135.104.1.14
 Windows provides several methods of name resolution:
• Windows Internet Name Service (WINS)
• broadcast name resolution
• domain name system (DNS)
• a host file
• an LMHOSTS file
 WINS consists of two or more WINS servers that maintain a dynamic
database of name to IP address bindings, and client software to
query the servers
 WINS uses the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), which
automatically updates address configurations in the WINS database,
without user or administrator intervention

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.58 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Programmer Interface —
Access to Kernel Object

 A process gains access to a kernel object named XXX by calling

the CreateXXX function to open a handle to XXX; the handle is
unique to that process.
 A handle can be closed by calling the CloseHandle function; the
system may delete the object if the count of processes using the
object drops to 0.
 Windows provides three ways to share objects between
processes
• A child process inherits a handle to the object
• One process gives the object a name when it is created and
the second process opens that name
• DuplicateHandle function:
 Given a handle to process and the handle’s value a
second process can get a handle to the same object, and
thus share it

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 Programmer Interface —
Process Management

 Process is started via the CreateProcess routine which loads any

dynamic link libraries that are used by the process, and creates a
primary thread
 Additional threads can be created by the CreateThread function
 Every dynamic link library or executable file that is loaded into the
address space of a process is identified by an instance handle

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 Process Management (Cont.)
 Scheduling in Win32 utilizes four priority classes:
1. IDLE_PRIORITY_CLASS (priority level 4)
2. BELOW_NORMAL_PRIORITY CLASS (NT priority level 6)
3. NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS (level 8 — typical for most processes
4. ABOVE_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS (level 10)
5. HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS (level 13)
6. REALTIME_PRIORITY_CLASS (level 24)
 To provide performance levels needed for interactive programs,
Windows has a special scheduling rule for processes in the
NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS
• Distinguishes between the foreground process that is currently
selected on the screen, and the background processes that are not
currently selected
• When a process moves into the foreground, increases the
scheduling quantum by some factor, typically 3

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 Process Management (Cont.)
 The kernel dynamically adjusts the priority of a thread depending on
whether it is I/O-bound or CPU-bound
 To synchronize the concurrent access to shared objects by threads,
the kernel provides synchronization objects, such as semaphores and
mutexes
• In addition, threads can synchronize by using the
WaitForSingleObject or WaitForMultipleObjects functions
• Another method of synchronization in the Win32 API is the critical
section

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 Process Management (Cont.)
 A fiber is user-mode code that gets scheduled according to a user-
defined scheduling algorithm
• Only one fiber at a time is permitted to execute, even on
multiprocessor hardware
• Windows includes fibers to facilitate the porting of legacy UNIX
applications that are written for a fiber execution model
 Windows also introduced user-mode scheduling for 64-bit systems
which allows finer grained control of scheduling work without requiring
kernel transitions

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 User-mode Scheduling

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 Programmer Interface —
Interprocess Communication

 Win32 applications can have interprocess communication by sharing

kernel objects
 An alternate means of interprocess communications is message
passing, which is particularly popular for Windows GUI applications
• One thread sends a message to another thread or to a window
• A thread can also send data with the message
 Every Win32 thread has its own input queue from which the thread
receives messages
 This is more reliable than the shared input queue of 16-bit windows,
because with separate queues, one stuck application cannot block
input to the other applications

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 Programmer Interface —
Memory Management

 Virtual memory:
• VirtualAlloc reserves or commits virtual memory
• VirtualFree decommits or releases the memory
• These functions enable the application to determine the virtual
address at which the memory is allocated
 An application can use memory by memory mapping a file into its
address space
• Multistage process
• Two processes share memory by mapping the same file into their
virtual memory

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 Memory Management (Cont.)
 A heap in the Win32 environment is a region of reserved address
space
• A Win 32 process is created with a 1 MB default heap
• Access is synchronized to protect the heap’s space allocation data
structures from damage by concurrent updates by multiple threads
 Because functions that rely on global or static data typically fail to work
properly in a multithreaded environment, the thread-local storage
mechanism allocates global storage on a per-thread basis
• The mechanism provides both dynamic and static methods of
creating thread-local storage

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 21.67 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 End of Chapter 21

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018