The Unix System

Unix is a Multi-user and Multi-tasking operating

system History
MULTICS (MULTIplexed Information and Computing

Service) (1965) Ken Thompson (Bell Laboratories -1969)

Space Wars, PDP-7, written in ASSEMBLER UNICS (UNiplexed Information and Computing Service)
Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie (1970-1974) UNIX, PDP-11 Ritchie develops C language (starting from B language) The third version of UNIX is written in C A paper on UNIX is published in 1974 (ACM Turing Award 1984)
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The Unix System

History, Bell Labs and AT&T UNIX
PDP-11 is the computer of many departments of computer

science and so UNIX becomes the OS of the Universities Bell Labs and AT&T UNIX development groups develop several version of UNIX: first edition (1969), ,seventh edition (1978,on PDP-11/70) a version for Interdata 8/2 and VAX UNIX for a network of computers System III (1982 - first commercial version) System V based on System III(1983) System V release 2, 3, 4 (1984 - 1989) SVR4 (System V release 4; 1989 AT&T and Sun Micro systems) 1993: AT&T becomes a phone company and sells UNIX to Novell
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The Unix System

History University of California at Berkeley The most influential of the non-Bell Labs and non-AT&T UNIX development groups:.
Thompson and some students develop 1BSD (Berkeley Software Distributions) starting from sixth edition (the first one out of Bell Labs) (1978). 3BSD - 4BSD UNIX resulted from DARPA funding to develop a standard UNIX system for government use. This series contains 4.1BSD, 4.2BSD, 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD (1980-93) and has some important new tools: virtual memory, paging, multiuser, network connection by means of TCP/IP. 4.2BSD contains the text editor vi, the shell csh, Pascal and Lisp compilers,
Sun Microsystem, DEC and

some other companies decides to develop their UNIX version starting from BSD versions instead of System V.
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History of UNIX Versions

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The Standardization Projects

History Several standardization projects seek to consolidate the variant flavors of UNIX leading to one programming interface to UNIX. The most important are:
POSIX (Portable Operating System): merge of System V and BSD (1984) IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard create OSF (Open Software Foundation) and their UNIX system is OSF/1 (1988) X/OPEN defines the Single UNIX specification (1993) and the systems satisfying this specification have the trademark UNIX 95 Open group (merge of Open Software Foundation and X/OPEN; http://www.opengroup.com 1996) Definition of the second version of the Single UNIX specification (1997) with the trademark UNIX 98
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A variant of the UNIX System

Although there are many version of UNIX, the

most important companies provide version based on UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the last the Single UNIX specification
ex. Solaris 2.x is the most widely used and most

successful commercial UNIX implementation.

These

systems are very big and very complicated (the contrary of the Thompsons basic idea) and in same case expensive. So, Tanenbaum develops MINIX (1987) a small free UNIX system (11800 rows of C code and 800 rows of Assembler code) satisfying POSIX.
MINIX is a free educational system based on micro-

kernel model (www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html)

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Common System Components of an OS

Process Management Main Memory Management File Management Secondary Memory Management I/O System Management Networking Protection System

Command-Interpreter System (Shell)

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System Structure
System structure: defines the connections

and manages the System Components

Some system structures

a. Monolithic
b. Client-Server model (micro-kernel)

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Monolithic Operating System Structure

A monolithic system has not a well defined structure. It

includes virtually all of the operating-system functionality in one large block of code that runs as a single process with a single address space. All the functional components of the kernel have access to all of its internal data structures and routines.

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The Client-Server Model

Moves as much from the kernel into user

space. In this way it remains only a micro-kernel.

Communication

takes place between modules using message passing.

user

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The Client-Server Model

Advantages
easier to extend a micro-kernel easier to port the operating system to new architectures more reliable (less code is running in kernel mode) more secure

Disadvantages
Deterioration of the performances

MINIX has the I/O drivers into the kernel (this is for

technical reasons connected to 8088 architecture), while the Main Memory Management, and the File Management are two different user processes.
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The Linux System

There is not a free BSD system at the end of the

eighties, and so many members of MINIX newsgroup ask to Tanenbaum to introduce many modifications for improving the performances of MINIX. Some of these modifications could change the original educational project of Tanenbaum, and so often he said NO to these requests. So, Linus Torvalds using a pc 386 with MINIX develops a small but self-contained kernel in 1991 (Linux 0.01), with the major design goal of UNIX compatibility (i.e., satisfying POSIX).
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Linux 0.01
The first version of Linux (Linux 0.01) has some of

features of MINIX (ex. File system), but the main differences between Linux and MINIX are:
The Linux kernel uses a monolithic model, and it has

many more functions than the micro-kernel of MINIX. From a theoretical point of view MINIX is better than Linux, but from a practical point of view the performances of Linux are better than that one of MINIX. However, for a description of the point of view of Torvalds on the advantages-disadvantages of LinuxMINIX see the flame war between Torvalds and Tanenbaum in:
Rivoluzionario per caso: come ho creato Linux (solo per divertirmi), Linus Torvalds, Garzanti
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The Linux Kernel

Linux 0.01 (May 1991) had no networking, ran only on

80386-compatible Intel 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 UNIXs standard TCP/IP networking protocols BSD-compatible socket interface for networking programming Device-driver support for running IP over an Ethernet Enhanced file system Support for a range of SCSI controllers for high-performance disk access Extra hardware support

This version is sufficient compatible with UNIX and many

people are interested in developing Linux under Torvald supervision. Linux 1.2 (March 1995) was the final PC-only Linux kernel.
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Linux 2.0
Released in June 1996,

2.0 added two major new

capabilities:
Support for multiple architectures Support for multiprocessor architectures

Other new features included:

Improved memory-management code Improved TCP/IP performance Support for internal kernel threads, for handling dependencies

between loadable modules, and for automatic loading of modules on demand. Standardized configuration interface

Available for Motorola 68000-series processors, Sun Sparc

systems, and for PC and PowerMac systems. Linux 2.2 January 1999 improves some aspects of Linux 2.0 The last release is Linux 2.4.20 (production) Linux 2.5.64 (development)
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The Moral of the Story

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 (software open source). 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.
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The Linux System

Linux uses many tools developed as part of Berkeleys BSD

operating system, System V, MITs X Window System, and the Free Software Foundation's GNU project. The main system libraries were started by the GNU (GNUs Not Unix) project (ex. gcc (GNU C compiler)), with improvements provided by the Linux community. Linux networking-administration tools were derived from 4.3 BSD code; recent BSD derivatives such as FreeBSD have borrowed code from Linux in return. The Linux system is maintained by a network of developers collaborating on Internet (see /usr/src/linux/CREDITS), with a small number of public ftp sites acting as de facto standard repositories.
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Linux Distributions
Standard, precompiled sets of packages, or distributions,

include the basic Linux system, system installation and management utilities, and ready-to-install packages of common UNIX tools. The first distributions managed these packages by simply providing a means of unpacking all the files into the appropriate places; modern distributions include advanced package management. Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake are popular distributions from commercial and noncommercial sources, respectively (see www.linux.org). The RPM Package file format permits compatibility among the various Linux distributions (see www.linuxbase.org).
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Which distribution to use ?

RedHat (www.redhat.com) Big, professional, very widely used

Debian (www.debian.org/) Open development model, excellent packaging system Mandrake (www.mandrakesoft.com) Aims to be very easy to install and use
SuSE (www.suse.com/) Compromise between Red Hat and Mandrake Slackware (www.slackware.com/) Most traditional; little extra help
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Mandrake Distribution
Mandrake

provides a simple and friendly distribution. Maybe, it is the best distribution for the desktop (www.mandrakesoft.com). The last release of Mandrake distribution is Mandrake 9.0 Dolphin and it is contained in three CDs. It contains the Linux kernel 2.4.19. The minimum installation requires only the first CD and takes only 60MB. The other two CD contain many packages. There are two different GUI (Graphical User Interface):
KDE (release 3.0.3) and GNOME (2.0.1)
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Mandrake Installation
The installation of Mandrake 9.0 Dolphin is very easy.
You can select Italian language The first time you should choose

principiante The more difficult step is the partition of the hard disk. A partition correspond to a logic disk. If you want to install some operating systems on your hard disk, you have to define a partition for each OS. A disk has at most 4 primary partitions. You can make these partitions by means of the command fdisk.The Mandrake installation provides a simple graphical tool for making the Linux partitions. We wish to point out that from DOS/Windows you cannot see the other partitions. On the contrary, Linux see DOS/Windows partition (/mnt/windows).

the installation for

However, all the steps of the installation will be

illustrated during the lecture.

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The Moral of the Installation

Varies from distribution to distribution Most modern distributions make it easy: Buy CD / download and burn CD image Boot Follow instructions Need to think about partitioning. Install a boot loader

(probably LILO (LInux LOader), maybe something else). This needs to be configured to boot whatever other operating systems you have installed.
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Users
Linux is an intrinsically multi-user system Every user on the system has its own username

and password The root user has ultimate power to run the system. You should not log in as root unless you really need to. During installation, you should have been prompted for a root password and also a username and password for an ordinary user account. The command passwd allows to change the password. Careful: you have to perform the program shutdown h now before to switch off the PC
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Linux Licensing
The Linux kernel is distributed under the GNU

General Public License (GPL), the terms of which are set out by the Free Software Foundation.
See /usr/src/linux/COPYING

The main consequence of GPL is that anyone

using Linux, or creating their own derivative of Linux, may not make the derived product proprietary; software released under the GPL may not be redistributed as a binary-only product.
For a deeper examination of this subject see

www.gnu.org/home.it.html
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