Introduction to

Objectives
1. A firm understanding about OS, its primary
purpose and goals to a computer system;
2. Trace the history of OS and the development
of systems.
3. Concepts basic to OS;
4. OS components and its component
management;
5. Computer system operations, structure of the
computer systems and hardware protection;
6. Services of OS.
 Introduction
 Major components of Computer Systems:
 Hardware

Computer users
 Software

 Note:
 Without software, computer is of little use. However
with software, computer can store, manipulate and
retrieve information, and can engage in many other
activities.
 Introduction
 Software can be grouped into:

System software (OS and utilities)
 Application software (user programs)

User1 User2 User3 User n

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 Introduction

Utilities
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OS
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 Introduction
 Without an OS, a user who wanted to run a
program that uses some of the resources of
the system will need to write a program that
includes code for driving the resources
required. Code for handling keyboard,
printers, etc. have to be written.
 Introduction
 To alleviate these difficulties, OS contains set
of procedures for driving the resources of the
system, thus it frees the users from the dirty
details of writing these drivers for the devices
involved in the problem being solved.
 What is OS?
 Program implemented either in firmware or
software which acts as an intermediary
between the user of a computer and the
computer hardware.
 Collection of system programs (procedures)
that together control the operation of a
computer system.
 The purpose is to provide an environment
wherein users can execute programs
 Different OS
 Mainframe OS

designed to optimize utilization of hardware.
 PC OS
 supports games, business applications, and the
like.
 Handheld OS
 designed to interface with the computer to
execute programs.
 Primary goals of an OS
1. Make the computer convenient to use
2. Use the computer hardware in an efficient
manner.
 Sizes of OS
 Its size & complexity depend on a number of
factors:
 Computer system characteristics: (has one or more
processors)


Provides facilities: (allows interactive use or not?)

 Applications to support (allows many users to use the

same application simultaneously or not?)
 Why study operating systems?
 In this course, we will NOT write OS but…
 It is one of the largest and most complicated system
software.

Draws on lots of areas
• Software Engineering, Computer Architecture, Data Structures,
Networks and Algorithms etc.

If certain things in the OS need to be changed,
better understand them first!
 Can apply techniques used in an OS to other areas
• complex data structures, conflict resolution, concurrency,
resource management
 What does an OS do?
It controls the function of the computer
system. OS includes programs that:

 Initializes the hardware

 Provides basic routine for device control

 Provides for the management, scheduling

and interaction of tasks

 Maintain system integrity, and

 Handle errors
 Where are OS found?
 Complexity of OS depends on the type of
functionality it provides:


Some OS manage many users on a network.

 Found in petrol pumps, airplanes, video

recorders, washing machines and car engines.
 What is a General Purpose OS?
 Provides the ability to run a number of
programs.
 MS Windows, UNIX, Linux, etc.
 Viewpoints of an OS
 Similar to a government
 Resource Allocator/Manager
 Control Program
 An extended machine

 Note: OS runs in a kernel/supervisor/monitor

mode (protection from user by the hardware)
 Single-user vs. Multi-user OS
 Single user OS provides access to the computer
system by a single user at a time.

Examples are: Win95, WinNT, Win2K, Win XP

 Provides with the capability to perform tasks on

the computer system such as writing programs
and documents, printing and accessing files
 Single-user vs. Multi-user OS
 A multi-user OS allows more users to access
the computer system at one time via network,
thus accessing the system remotely from
another terminal.
 Examples are UNIX and mainframes such as the
IBM AS400.
 Multi-user OS
Advantages

Hardware is very expensive, and it lets a number
of users share this expensive resource (reduced
cost)
 Since resources are shared, they are more likely
to be in use than sitting idle being unproductive.
(increased resource utilization)
 Multi-user OS
Disadvantages

More users slow down the performance of the
system.
 Cost of hardware, requires a lot of disk space
and memory.

Multi-user OS cost is more than software for
single-user.
 Operating System Utilities
 OS consists of hundreds of thousands of
program codes and stored on hard disk.
Portions of the OS are loaded into the
RAM when needed.

 Utilities are provided for:

 Managing files and documents

Development of programs and software
 Communicating with people and with other
computer systems
 Managing user requirements for programs,
storage space and priority.
 OS Interfaces
 OS provides each user with an interface
that accepts, interprets and executes user
commands or programs.
 Shell or command line interpreter. (CLI)
 In some systems, this might be a simple line-
by-line text mode (such as DOS or UNIX) or
highly graphical (such as Windows)
 What is a multitasking OS?
 Provides the ability to run more than one
program at once.

 Each of these tasks the user is doing

appears to be running at the same time

 Advantage: increased productivity

 Disadvantage: more memory required.
 Evolution of OS
 Programmed in machine language and used
front panel switches for input.
 The programmer is also the operator interacting with
the computer directly from the system console
(control panel).

 Introduce Device drivers (a subroutine

performing various I/O devices which involves
complex sequences of device-specific
operations)
 Setup time is very high.
 Evolution of OS
 Problems:

Programmers needed to sign-up in
advance to use the computer one at a
time.

 Executing a single program (often called

job) required substantial time to setup the
computer.
 A. Simple Batch Systems
 Similar jobs are batched and run together with
no direct interaction between user and the
computer during execution.
 Automatic job sequencing
 Computers are extremely valuable.
 Pre-OS: Resident Monitor

Initial control in monitor
 Control transfers to job
 When job completes, control transfers back to
monitor
 Overlapped CPU and I/O operations

 Online Processing – CPU is directly connected

to card readers and line printers
 Overlapped CPU and I/O operations
 Off-line Processing

 Spooling
 Simultaneous Peripheral Operation Online.
 Uses disk as input device and for storing output files.
 B. Multiprogrammed Batch Systems
 OS keeps several jobs in memory at a time and
picks and begins to execute one of the jobs in the
memory.

 Drawback: Causes the computer system to stop

executing when the monitor encounters error
(bug). Other jobs in the memory will not be
executed as well.
 C. Time sharing systems
 Interactive Computing

Allows interaction between user and process.
The CPU executes multiple jobs by switching
between them but the switches occur so
frequently that users may interact with each
program while it is running.
Monitor
Job 1
T1
Job 2
T2
Job 3
T3 Job n
T4
 Time sharing systems
 Time sharing (or multitasking)
is a logical
extension of microprogramming.
Job A Job B

CPU

I/O

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 time

Uniprogramming: Job A and B end at time 36

CPU is idle 47%
I/O is idle 53
 Time sharing systems

Job A Job B
CPU

I/O

0 5 10 15 time

“pure” multiprogramming
Job A and B end at time 20.
 Sample problem #1:
 Consider a system designed to run only one
user program at a time. Suppose the user is
running a program designed to execute the ff
sequence of instructions:
while (not end of input) {
read from the card reader
process the data
: :
write to the printer
: :
}
 Sample problem #1:

 Assuming that the computer system has the

following characteristics:
 Card reader: 300 cards / min.
 Line printer : 300 lines / min.

CPU : 1 µ s/instruction
 Sample problem #1:
 Suppose it takes about 10,000 instructions to
process each line (one card) of input, then a card
will require the ff:

Input phase
• (1 min/ 300 cards) x (60,000 ms/min) = 200 ms
 Process phase
• (10,000 inst) x (1 µ s/inst) = 10 ms
 Output phase
• (1 min/ 300 cards) x (60,000 ms/min) = 200 ms

 CPU utilization = (10 / 410) x 100% = 2.4 %

 Therefore, it shows poor CPU utilization
 It’s your turn
 Sample Question #2: Given the following
characteristics of a single-user system:
 Card reader : 600 cards /min

Line printer : 100 lines /min
 CPU : 1 µ sec / instruction

 Suppose it takes 1,000 instructions to process

each line of input and produce one line of output,
compute the CPU utilization, and input and
output device utilization.
 D. Personal Computer
 Personal Computer
 computer system dedicated to a single user

 I/O devices
 User convenience and responsiveness
 Adopt technology developed for larger OS often
individuals have sole use of computer and do not need
advance CPU utilization or protection features
 May run several different types of OS
 E. Parallel Systems
 Systems having more than one processor
(multiprocessor systems) in close
communication, sharing the common bus,
clock, memory and peripheral devices.

 Tightly coupled; multiprocessing

 Advantages of parallel systems

 Increased throughput
 Economical
 Increased reliability
 Graceful degradation

Fail-safe systems
 Types of parallel systems
 Symmetric multiprocessing model (SMP)

Each processor runs an identical copy of the OS
and these copies communicate with each other
 Many processes can run at once without
performance deterioration

Most modern OS support SMP
CPU 1 CPU2 CPU3 CPU4
 Types of parallel systems

 Asymmetric multiprocessing model (AMP)


Each processor is assigned a specific task;
master processor schedules, and allocated work
to slave processors.
 More common in extremely large systems

Master CPU

Slaves CPU
 F. Distributed Systems
 Distribute computation among several
processors.
 F. Distributed Systems
 Loosely coupled systems

processors do not share memory or a clock,
instead, each processor has its own local memory.
 Requires networking infrastructure
 LAN or WAN implementations

May be either client-server of peer-to-peer systems
 Resources on each machine are managed by
that machine’s OS and working together to
manage the collective network resources
 Reasons for building Distributed
Systems
 Resource sharing
 Computation Speedup

allows to distribute the computation among various
sites.
 Movement of jobs is called “load sharing”
 Reliability
 Communications
 Distributed Systems : Clustered

 Clustering allows two or more systems to

share storage.
 Provides high reliability
 Asymmetric clustering
 one server runs the application while other
servers standby
 Symmetric clustering
 all n hosts are running the application.
 G. Real-time systems
 Used as a control device in a dedicated
application
 Eg. controlling scientific experiments, medical
imaging systems, industrial control systems, and
some display systems
 Real-time OS

Designed to support execution of tasks within
specific clock time constraints.

Correctness of a processing task is dependent
on the clock time at which the processing
occurred
 Real-time systems

 Deadline (time critical) requirement – well-

defined fixed-time constraints.
 Eg. Industrial control systems, weapons
systems, computer controlled products, ballistic
missile control systems, airline reservation
systems.
 Handheld Systems

 Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s)

 Cellular telephones
 Issues
• Limited memory
• Slow processors
• Small display screens
• (still true today?)
 H. Embedded Systems
 Also known as dedicated systems.
 Perform a specific task only and cannot run a
wide variety of programs unlike general-
purpose systems.
Migration of OS Concepts and
Features