I/O Systems

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne

 I/O Systems
 Overview
 I/O Hardware
 Application I/O Interface
 Kernel I/O Subsystem
 STREAMS
 Performance

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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, buses, device controllers connect to various
devices
 Device drivers encapsulate device details
 Present uniform device-access interface to I/O
subsystem

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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 bus common in PCs and servers, PCI Express (PCIe)
 expansion bus connects relatively slow devices
 Controller (host adapter) – electronics that operate port, bus, device
 Sometimes integrated
 Sometimes separate circuit board (host adapter)
 Contains processor, microcode, private memory, bus controller,
etc
– Some talk to per-device controller with bus controller,
microcode, memory, etc

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 A Typical PC Bus Structure

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 I/O Hardware (Cont.)
 I/O instructions control devices
 Devices usually have registers where device driver
places commands, addresses, and data to write, or
read data from registers after command execution
 Data-in register, data-out register, status
register, control register
 Typically 1-4 bytes, or FIFO buffer
 Devices have addresses, used by
 Direct I/O instructions
 Memory-mapped I/O
 Device data and command registers mapped
to processor address space
 Especially for large address spaces (graphics)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Device I/O Port Locations on PCs (partial)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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
 Step 1 is busy-wait cycle to wait for I/O from device
 Reasonable if device is fast
 But inefficient if device slow
 CPU switches to other tasks?
 But if miss a cycle data overwritten / lost

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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
 Interrupt chaining if more than one device at same
interrupt number

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Interrupt-Driven I/O Cycle

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Intel Pentium Processor Event-Vector Table

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Interrupts (Cont.)
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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
 When done, interrupts to signal completion
 Version that is aware of virtual addresses can be even
more efficient - DVMA

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Six Step Process to Perform DMA Transfer

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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
 Speed of operation
 read-write, read only, or write only

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 A Kernel I/O Structure

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Characteristics of I/O Devices

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Characteristics of I/O Devices (Cont.)

 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Block and Character Devices
 Block devices include disk drives
 The block-device interface captures all the aspects
necessary for accessing disk drives and other block-
oriented devices.
 The device should understand the commands such as
read () & write (), and if it is a random access device, it
has a seek() command to specify which block to transfer
next.
 Raw I/O, direct I/O, or file-system access
 Memory-mapped file access can be layered on top of
block-device drivers. Rather than offering read and write
operations, a memory-mapped interface provides access
to disk storage via an array of bytes in main memory.
 Character devices include keyboards, mice, serial ports
 Commands include get(), put()
 Libraries layered on top allow line editing

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Clocks and Timers
 Most computers have hardware clocks and timers
that provide three basic functions:
1. Give the current time
2. Give the elapsed time
3. Set a timer to trigger operation X at time
T
 These functions are used by the operating
system & also by time sensitive applications.
 Programmable interval timer: The hardware to
measure elapsed time and to trigger operations is
called a programmable interval timer. It can be
set to wait a certain amount of time and then to
generate an interrupt. To generate periodic
interrupts, it can be set to do this operation once
or to repeat.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Two I/O Methods

Synchronou Asynchronous
s

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Kernel I/O Subsystem
 Kernels provide many services related to I/O.
i. One way that the I/O subsystem improves the
efficiency of the computer is by scheduling I/O operations.
ii. Another way is by using storage space in main
memory or on disk, via techniques called buffering, caching,
and spooling.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Kernel I/O Subsystem
 I/O Scheduling
 Some I/O request ordering via per-device queue
a) It can improve overall system performance,
b) It can share device access fairly among
processes, and
c) It can reduce the average waiting time for I/0 to
complete.
 Implementation: OS developers implement scheduling by
maintaining a ―queue of requests for each device.
1. When an application issues a blocking I/O system
call,
2. The request is placed on the queue for that device.
3. The I/O scheduler rearranges the order of the
queue to improve the overall system efficiency and the
average response time experienced by applications.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Device-status Table

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Sun Enterprise 6000 Device-Transfer Rates

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Kernel I/O Subsystem
 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
 Full / being processed and not-full / being used
 Copy-on-write can be used for efficiency in some cases

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Kernel I/O Subsystem
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 STREAMS
 STREAM – a full-duplex communication channel
between a user-level process and a device in Unix
System V and beyond
 A STREAM consists of:
 STREAM head interfaces with the user process
 driver end interfaces with the device
 zero or more STREAM modules between them
 Each module contains a read queue and a write queue

 Message passing is used to communicate between

queues
 Flow control option to indicate available or busy
 Asynchronous internally, synchronous where user
process communicates with stream head

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 The STREAMS Structure

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Performance

 I/O a major factor in system performance:

 Demands CPU to execute device driver,
kernel I/O code
 Context switches due to interrupts
 Data copying
 Network traffic especially stressful

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Intercomputer Communications

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Improving Performance
 Reduce number of context switches
 Reduce data copying
 Reduce interrupts by using large transfers, smart
controllers, polling
 Use DMA
 Use smarter hardware devices
 Balance CPU, memory, bus, and I/O performance for
highest throughput
 Move user-mode processes / daemons to kernel
threads

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Device-Functionality Progression

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 13.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne