Chapter 5

Input/Output
5.1 Principles of I/O hardware
5.2 Principles of I/O software
5.3 I/O software layers
5.4 Disks
5.5 Clocks
5.6 Character-oriented terminals
5.7 Graphical user interfaces
5.8 Network terminals
5.9 Power management
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 Principles of I/O Hardware

Some typical device, network, and data base rates 2

 Device Controllers
• I/O devices have components:
– mechanical component
– electronic component
• The electronic component is the device
controller
– may be able to handle multiple devices
• Controller's tasks
– convert serial bit stream to block of bytes
– perform error correction as necessary
– make available to main memory
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 Memory-Mapped I/O (1)

• Separate I/O and memory space

• Memory-mapped I/O
• Hybrid
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 Memory-Mapped I/O (2)

(a) A single-bus architecture

(b) A dual-bus memory architecture
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Direct Memory Access (DMA)

Operation of a DMA transfer

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 Interrupts Revisited

How interrupts happens. Connections between devices and interrupt controller

actually use interrupt lines on the bus rather than dedicated wires

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 Principles of I/O Software
Goals of I/O Software (1)
• Device independence
– programs can access any I/O device
– without specifying device in advance
· (floppy, hard drive, or CD-ROM)
• Uniform naming
– name of a file or device a string or an integer
– not depending on which machine
• Error handling
– handle as close to the hardware as possible

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 Goals of I/O Software (2)
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous transfers
– blocked transfers vs. interrupt-driven
• Buffering
– data coming off a device cannot be stored in
final destination
• Sharable vs. dedicated devices
– disks are sharable
– tape drives would not be

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Programmed I/O (1)

Steps in printing a string

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 Programmed I/O (2)

Writing a string to the printer using

programmed I/O
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 Interrupt-Driven I/O

• Writing a string to the printer using interrupt-driven I/O

– Code executed when print system call is made
– Interrupt service procedure

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 I/O Using DMA

• Printing a string using DMA

– code executed when the print system call is made
– interrupt service procedure

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 I/O Software Layers

Layers of the I/O Software System

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 Interrupt Handlers (1)
• Interrupt handlers are best hidden
– have driver starting an I/O operation block until
interrupt notifies of completion
• Interrupt procedure does its task
– then unblocks driver that started it
• Steps must be performed in software after
interrupt completed
1. Save regs not already saved by interrupt hardware
2. Set up context for interrupt service procedure

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 Interrupt Handlers (2)
3. Set up stack for interrupt service procedure
4. Ack interrupt controller, reenable interrupts
5. Copy registers from where saved
6. Run service procedure
7. Set up MMU context for process to run next
8. Load new process' registers
9. Start running the new process

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 Device Drivers

• Logical position of device drivers is shown here

• Communications between drivers and device controllers goes over the bus

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Device-Independent I/O Software (1)

Uniform interfacing for device drivers

Buffering
Error reporting
Allocating and releasing dedicate devices
Providing a deice-independent block size

Functions of the device-independent I/O software

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Device-Independent I/O Software (2)

(a) Without a standard driver interface

(b) With a standard driver interface
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Device-Independent I/O Software (3)

(a) Unbuffered input

(b) Buffering in user space
(c) Buffering in the kernel followed by copying to user space
(d) Double buffering in the kernel 20
Device-Independent I/O Software (4)

Networking may involve many copies

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 User-Space I/O Software

Layers of the I/O system and the main functions of each layer

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 Disks
Disk Hardware (1)

Disk parameters for the original IBM PC floppy disk and

a Western Digital WD 18300 hard disk 23
 Disk Hardware (2)

• Physical geometry of a disk with two zones

• A possible virtual geometry for this disk 24
 Disk Hardware (3)

• Raid levels 0 through 2

• Backup and parity drives are shaded
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 Disk Hardware (4)

• Raid levels 3 through 5

• Backup and parity drives are shaded
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 Disk Hardware (5)

Recording structure of a CD or CD-ROM

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 Disk Hardware (6)

Logical data layout on a CD-ROM

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 Disk Hardware (7)

• Cross section of a CD-R disk and laser

– not to scale
• Silver CD-ROM has similar structure
– without dye layer
– with pitted aluminum layer instead of gold

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 Disk Hardware (8)

A double sided, dual layer DVD disk

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Disk Formatting (1)

A disk sector

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 Disk Formatting (2)

An illustration of cylinder skew

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Disk Formatting (3)

• No interleaving
• Single interleaving
• Double interleaving

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Disk Arm Scheduling Algorithms (1)
• Time required to read or write a disk
block determined by 3 factors
1. Seek time
2. Rotational delay
3. Actual transfer time
• Seek time dominates
• Error checking is done by controllers

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Disk Arm Scheduling Algorithms (2)
Initial Pending
position requests

Shortest Seek First (SSF) disk scheduling algorithm

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Disk Arm Scheduling Algorithms (3)

The elevator algorithm for scheduling disk requests

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 Error Handling

• A disk track with a bad sector

• Substituting a spare for the bad sector
• Shifting all the sectors to bypass the bad one
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 Stable Storage

Analysis of the influence of crashes on stable writes

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 Clocks
Clock Hardware

A programmable clock
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 Clock Software (1)

Three ways to maintain the time of day

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 Clock Software (2)

Simulating multiple timers with a single clock

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 Soft Timers
• A second clock available for timer interrupts
– specified by applications
– no problems if interrupt frequency is low

• Soft timers avoid interrupts

– kernel checks for soft timer expiration before it
exits to user mode
– how well this works depends on rate of kernel
entries
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 Character Oriented Terminals
RS-232 Terminal Hardware

• An RS-232 terminal communicates with computer 1 bit at a time

• Called a serial line – bits go out in series, 1 bit at a time
• Windows uses COM1 and COM2 ports, first to serial lines
• Computer and terminal are completely independent
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 Input Software (1)

• Central buffer pool

• Dedicated buffer for each terminal
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 Input Software (2)

Characters handled specially in canonical mode

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 Output Software

The ANSI escape sequences

• accepted by terminal driver on output
• ESC is ASCII character (0x1B)
• n,m, and s are optional numeric parameters

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 Display Hardware (1)

Parallel port

Memory-mapped displays
• driver writes directly into display's video RAM

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Display Hardware (2)

• A video RAM image

– simple monochrome display
– character mode
• Corresponding screen
– the xs are attribute bytes

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 Input Software
• Keyboard driver delivers a number
– driver converts to characters
– uses a ASCII table

• Exceptions, adaptations needed for

other languages
– many OS provide for loadable keymaps
or code pages

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 Output Software for Windows (1)

Sample window located at (200,100) on XGA display50

Output Software for Windows (2)

Skeleton of a Windows main program (part 1) 51

Output Software for Windows (3)

Skeleton of a Windows main program (part 2) 52

Output Software for Windows (4)

An example rectangle drawn using Rectangle

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Output Software for Windows (5)

• Copying bitmaps using BitBlt.

– before
– after

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 Output Software for Windows (6)

Examples of character outlines at different point sizes

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 Network Terminals
X Windows (1)

Clients and servers in the M.I.T. X Window System

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 X Windows (2)

Skeleton of an X Windows application program 57

The SLIM Network Terminal (1)

The architecture of the SLIM terminal system

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 The SLIM Network Terminal (2)

Messages used in the SLIM protocol from the server to the terminals

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 Power Management (1)

Power consumption of various parts of a laptop computer

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 Power management (2)

The use of zones for backlighting the display

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Power Management (3)

• Running at full clock speed

• Cutting voltage by two
– cuts clock speed by two,
– cuts power by four

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 Power Management (4)
• Telling the programs to use less energy
– may mean poorer user experience

• Examples
– change from color output to black and white
– speech recognition reduces vocabulary
– less resolution or detail in an image

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