Operating System

Unit IV
I/O Systems
 I/O Systems
• Overview
• I/O Hardware
• Application I/O Interface
• Kernel I/O Subsystem

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 Overview
• I/O management is a major component of operating system design
and operation
✓Important aspect of computer operation
✓I/O devices vary greatly
✓Various methods to control them
✓Performance management
✓New types of devices frequent
• Ports, busses, device controllers connect to various devices
• Device drivers encapsulate device details
• Present uniform device-access interface to I/O subsystem

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 I/O Hardware
• Incredible variety of I/O devices
✓Storage
✓Transmission
✓Human-interface
• Common concepts – signals from I/O devices interface with computer
✓Port – connection point for device
✓Bus - daisy chain or shared direct access
✓ PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect ) bus common in PCs and servers, PCI Express (PCIe)
✓ expansion bus connects relatively slow devices
✓Controller (host adapter) – electronics that operate port, bus, device
• Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA)
• Memory-mapped I/O
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 I/O Hardware (Cond..)

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 Polling
• For each byte of I/O
1. Read busy bit from status register until 0
2. Host sets read or write bit and if write copies data into data-out register
3. Host sets command-ready bit
4. Controller sets busy bit, executes transfer
5. Controller clears busy bit, error bit, command-ready bit when transfer done

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 Interrupts
• Polling can happen in 3 instruction cycles
✓Read status, logical-and to extract status bit, branch if not zero
✓How to be more efficient if non-zero infrequently?
• CPU Interrupt-request line triggered by I/O device
✓Checked by processor after each instruction
• Interrupt handler receives interrupts
✓Maskable to ignore or delay some interrupts
• Interrupt vector to dispatch interrupt to correct handler
✓Context switch at start and end
✓Based on priority
✓Some nonmaskable
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 Interrupt-Driven I/O Cycle

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 Interrupts (Cond..)
• Interrupt mechanism also used for exceptions
✓Terminate process, crash system due to hardware error
• Page fault executes when memory access error
• System call executes via trap to trigger kernel to execute request
• Multi-CPU systems can process interrupts concurrently
✓If operating system designed to handle it
• Used for time-sensitive processing, frequent, must be fast

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 Direct Memory Access
• Used to avoid programmed I/O (one byte at a time) for large data
movement
• Requires DMA controller
• Bypasses CPU to transfer data directly between I/O device and
memory
• OS writes DMA command block into memory
✓Source and destination addresses
✓Read or write mode
✓Count of bytes
✓Writes location of command block to DMA controller
✓Bus mastering of DMA controller – grabs bus from CPU
➢ Cycle stealing from CPU but still much more efficient
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 DMA (Cond..)

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 Application I/O Interface
• I/O system calls encapsulate device behaviors in generic classes
• Device-driver layer hides differences among I/O controllers from
kernel
• New devices talking already-implemented protocols need no extra
work
• Each OS has its own I/O subsystem structures and device driver
frameworks
• Devices vary in many dimensions
✓Character-stream or block
✓Sequential or random-access
✓Synchronous or asynchronous (or both)
✓Sharable or dedicated

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 Characteristics of I/O Devices

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 Characteristics of I/O Devices (Cond..)
• Subtleties of devices handled by device drivers
• Broadly I/O devices can be grouped by the OS into
✓Block I/O
✓Character I/O (Stream)
✓Memory-mapped file access
✓Network sockets
• For direct manipulation of I/O device specific characteristics, usually
an escape / back door
✓Unix ioctl() call to send arbitrary bits to a device control register and data
to device data register

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 Block and Character Devices
• Block devices include disk drives
✓Commands include read, write, seek
✓Raw I/O, direct I/O, or file-system access
✓Memory-mapped file access possible
➢ File mapped to virtual memory and clusters brought via demand paging
✓DMA
• Character devices include keyboards, mice, serial ports
✓Commands include get(), put()
✓Libraries layered on top allow line editing

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 Network Devices
• Varying enough from block and character to have own interface
• Linux, Unix, Windows and many others include socket interface
✓Separates network protocol from network operation
✓Includes select() functionality
• Approaches vary widely (pipes, FIFOs, streams, queues, mailboxes)

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 Clocks and Timers
• Provide current time, elapsed time, timer
• Normal resolution about 1/60 second
• Some systems provide higher-resolution timers
• Programmable interval timer used for timings, periodic interrupts
• ioctl() (on UNIX) covers odd aspects of I/O such as clocks and
timers

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 Nonblocking and Asynchronous I/O
• Blocking - process suspended until I/O completed
✓Easy to use and understand
✓Insufficient for some needs
• Nonblocking - I/O call returns as much as available
✓User interface, data copy (buffered I/O)
✓Implemented via multi-threading
✓Returns quickly with count of bytes read or written
✓select() to find if data ready then read() or write() to transfer
• Asynchronous - process runs while I/O executes
✓Difficult to use
✓I/O subsystem signals process when I/O completed

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 Two I/O methods

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 Vectored I/O
• Vectored I/O allows one system call to perform multiple I/O
operations
• For example, Unix readve() accepts a vector of multiple buffers to
read into or write from
• This scatter-gather method better than multiple individual I/O calls
✓Decreases context switching and system call overhead
✓Some versions provide atomicity
➢ Avoid for example worry about multiple threads changing data as reads / writes
occurring

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 Kernel I/O Subsystem
• Scheduling
✓Some I/O request ordering via per-device queue
✓Some OSs try fairness
✓Some implement Quality Of Service (i.e. IPQOS)
• Buffering - store data in memory while transferring between devices
✓To cope with device speed mismatch
✓To cope with device transfer size mismatch
✓To maintain “copy semantics”
• Double buffering – two copies of the data
✓ Kernel and user
✓ Varying sizes
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 Device-status Table

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 Kernel I/O Subsystem (Cond..)
• Caching - faster device holding copy of data
✓Always just a copy
✓Key to performance
✓Sometimes combined with buffering
• Spooling - hold output for a device
✓If device can serve only one request at a time
✓i.e., Printing
• Device reservation - provides exclusive access to a device
✓System calls for allocation and de-allocation
✓Watch out for deadlock

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 Error Handling
• OS can recover from disk read, device unavailable, transient write
failures
✓Retry a read or write, for example
✓Some systems more advanced – Solaris FMA, AIX
➢ Track error frequencies, stop using device with increasing frequency of retry-able errors
• Most return an error number or code when I/O request fails
• System error logs hold problem reports

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 I/O Protection
• User process may accidentally or purposefully attempt to disrupt
normal operation via illegal I/O instructions
✓All I/O instructions defined to be privileged
✓I/O must be performed via system calls
➢ Memory-mapped and I/O port memory locations must be protected too

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 Use of a system call to perform I/O

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 Kernel Data Structures
• Kernel keeps state info for I/O components, including open file tables,
network connections, character device state
• Many, many complex data structures to track buffers, memory
allocation, “dirty” blocks
• Some use object-oriented methods and message passing to
implement I/O
✓Windows uses message passing
➢ Message with I/O information passed from user mode into kernel

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 UNIX I/O Kernel Structure

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Acknowledgement
Operating-System Concepts
by
Abraham-Silberschatz
Peter Baer Galvin
Greg Gagne

Ninth Edition

Publisher : Wiley

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