Introduction

COL331/COL633

Abhilash Jindal Reference. OSTEP book: Chapter 2

Administrivia

• http://abhilash-jindal.com/teaching/2023-2-col-331/
• Grading criteria, TAs, late policy, audit criteria, quizzes, labs, project, piazza
link

• Piazza access code: col331col633

Why does OS matter to a computer?
Computer organization

(Non-volatile)

CPU CPU Disk controller USB controller Graphics adapter

Memory (volatile)
Purpose of an OS

• Resource management
• Provide higher-level services
• Protection and isolation
Purpose of OS: Resource management

• Example: cpu.c
• Give the illusion of more CPUs than there are
• Multiplex the hardware
Operating system

Computer hardware
Calculator analogy: Computing long sum
• 2 0 = (move pointer to 10)
20
• + 1 0 = (move pointer to 30)
10
• + 3 0 = (move pointer to 50)
30

50
• + 5 0 = (move pointer to 30)
30 • + 3 0 = (move pointer to 10)
10 • + 1 0 = (move pointer to 20)
20
• + 2 0 = (move pointer to 10)
10
Sharing the calculator
• Steps to share the calculator:
20 10
• 20 + 10 = 30 + 30 = 60
10 70
• Write 60 in notebook, remember that we were done till
30 20 30, give calculator
50 40
• 10 + 70 = 80
30 20
• Write 80 in notebook, remember that we were done till
10 10 70, give the calculator back
20 50

10 10
Remember whatever is on the screen and give calculator?

• 2 0 = (move pointer to 10)

Can I give calculator
20 10
• + 1 0 = (move pointer to 30) here?
10 70
• + 3 0 = (move pointer to 50) “Save 1 and remember
30 20 pointer to be at 10”
50 40
• + 5 0 = (move pointer to 30)
No! Sum would be wrong!
30 20 • + 3 0 = (move pointer to 10)
“+ xx = (move pointer)” has
10 10 • + 1 0 = (move pointer to 20) to be atomic
20 50
• + 2 0 = (move pointer to 10)
10 10
Resource manager: multiplexing CPU
• CPU is also executing one instruction after another and incrementing “instruction
pointer”

• OS switches CPU between processes in the same manner as our calculator

example

• What should happen when multiple processes want to run simultaneously?

• Fairness: One banker got more calculator time than others
• Often need to break away from fairness. Game should get more CPU time than
Dropbox to provide good user experience

• Starvation freedom: When there are multiple bankers, one banker never got the
calculator
 Purpose of OS: Resource manager
Di erent approaches to memory management:

• Segment di erent memory portions to di erent

processes

• Multiplex memory pages across processes

Operating system

.. .. ..
Computer hardware
Or
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. .. ..
ff
ff
ff
Memory management
• Segmentation is cheap to implement
• But not exible. What if a process needs more memory that what OS gave?
• Paging is complicated to implement
• Highly exible

.. .. ..

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. .. ..
fl
fl
Purpose of an OS

• Resource management
• Provide higher-level services
• Protection and isolation
Purpose of OS: Provide higher-level services

Example: io.c

Disk interface: List of blocks

File system OS interface: Folders and les

int fd = open("/tmp/file", O_WRONLY | O_CREAT);

Operating system int rc = write(fd, "hello world\n", 13);
close(fd);

Computer hardware 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. .. ..
fi
 Why file system?
Why not just multiplex disk blocks like memory?

• Disk blocks live after programs exits, computer restarts

• Di erent programs read / write same le
• vim writes io.c
• gcc reads io.c, write io
Operating system • We nally run io

Computer hardware 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. .. ..
ff
fi
fi
Higher level services provide portability

• Abstract away hardware details

• Programs need not be rewritten when
moving from hard-disk drive to solid
state drive

int fd = open("/tmp/file", O_WRONLY | O_CREAT);

Operating system int rc = write(fd, "hello world\n", 13);
close(fd);

Computer hardware 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. .. ..
Purpose of an OS

• Resource management
• Provide higher-level services
• Protection and isolation
Purpose of OS: Protection
• S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR: File can only be rw by user
• Disallow inappropriate accesses. Example: users
reading each other’s les

int fd = open(“/home/abhilash/exam.txt”, S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR);

Operating system int rc = write(fd, “Q1: \n”, 4);
close(fd);

Computer hardware 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. .. ..
fi
Purpose of OS: Protection
• Disallow inappropriate accesses.
Example: processes reading each
other’s memory

Operating system

Computer hardware 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. .. ..
Purpose of OS: Isolation

• Example: mem.c
• Multiple processes access the same pointer
location but the OS isolated them with the
help of hardware

• Each process thinks they own the memory

Operating system

Computer hardware MMU 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. .. ..

Course structure: OS in action
• We will build an OS (xv6) from scratch
• Booting: Bootloader, ELF format
• Input-output: Programmable interrupt controllers, traps, interrupt descriptor table
• File system: FS layout, bu er cache layer, name layer, crash consistency, devices as les
• Processes: memory segmentation, rings, process table, context switching, scheduling,
system calls, exec system call

• Concurrency: data races, di erent types of locks

• Memory virtualization: memory hierarchy, address translation mechanism, demand paging,
thrashing, fork system call

• Shell: Pipes, IO redirection

• Parallelism: Enable more CPUs, revisit locks
ff
ff
fi
Data races due to concurrency
./threads 100000

Thread 1 Thread 2
Read counter = 0
Write counter = 1
Read counter = 1
Writer counter = 2
Read counter = 2
Read counter = 2
Writer counter = 3
Writer counter = 3
Why should I learn OS in 2024?
Isn’t it a solved problem?
We have indeed made good progress ..
 Please run my job

Ok. I will. After

the 10 jobs in queue
are done!

Computer operators
1960s: Batch jobs
Personal
computers
1980s: Interactive jobs!
2000s: Cloud

VM1 VM2 VM3 • Cloud: I can rent virtual machines so I don’t have
to buy and manage servers.

• Hypervisor provides facilities to operating

OS OS OS systems that OS provides to processes

Hypervisor / • multiplexes hardware among OS

Virtual machine monitor
• protects and isolates OS from each other
Computer hardware
• Hypervisors fundamentally enabled cloud
computing
2000s: Smartphones
• New kinds of higher-level services: localisation,
cellular, accelerometer, touch interface, etc.

• Resource constraints: Power management, UI system,

etc.

• Even higher-level services: voice recognition,

augmented reality, etc.

• Increased security concerns because of increase in

sensitive data with rise of mobile banking, UPI etc.
and because of moving devices
2000s: Cyber-physical systems
OS must not crash! Formally veri ed OS. Example: seL4
fi
Typical progression of systems research
• Systems optimise for the “common case”
Users

• If common case changes, we need to rethink OS

design Applications

• Macro examples
Libraries
• Personal computers: batch jobs to interactive jobs
• Smartphones: resource constraints, new sensors Operating systems

• Cyber physical systems: risk of human life Hardware

More trends: persistent memory
• Memory: volatile but fast
• Disk: persistent but large
• PMEM: persistent and fast!
• PMEM aware le systems
fi
More trends: big memory
• OS were designed when memory was scarce: few KBs
• You can now buy a server with 12TB of DRAM!
• Transparent huge pages
More trends: fast networks
• OS typically assumed network is
much slower than DRAM

• Far memory 2020s Latency Bandwidth

DRAM 15ns 400 GBps

Ethernet 500ns 50 GBps

Rise of Unikernels

VM1 VM2 VM3 • OS optimises for common behaviours across

all applications

• Each OS is now running only single application

OS OS OS
• Unikernels optimise only for a single
application
Hypervisor /
Virtual machine monitor

Computer hardware
Why should I care about learning OS?
If I don’t want to do systems research

• OS is ultimately a study of abstraction. Absorb all the complexity away from

the developer / the user.

• Principles are useful when designing any large-scale system