Operating

Systems:
Internals Chapter 11
and
Design I/O Management
Principles and Disk Scheduling
Ninth Edition
By William Stallings

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 Categories of I/O Devices
External devices that engage in I/O with computer
systems can be grouped into three categories:

Human readable

• Suitable for communicating with the computer user

• Printers, terminals, video display, keyboard, mouse

Machine readable

• Suitable for communicating with electronic equipment

• Disk drives, USB keys, sensors, controllers

Communication

• Suitable for communicating with remote devices

• Modems, digital line drivers

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 Differences in I/O Devices
 Devices differ in a number of areas:
Data Rate
• There may be differences of magnitude between the data transfer rates

Application
• The use to which a device is put has an influence on the software

Complexity of Control
• The effect on the operating system is filtered by the complexity of the I/O module that controls the device

Unit of Transfer
• Data may be transferred as a stream of bytes or characters or in larger blocks

Data Representation
• Different data encoding schemes are used by different devices

Error Conditions
• The nature of errors, the way in which they are reported, their consequences, and
the available range of responses differs from one device to another

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 Organization of the I/O
Function
 Three techniques for performing I/O are:
 Programmed I/O
 The processor issues an I/O command on behalf of a process to an I/O module; that
process then busy waits for the operation to be completed before proceeding

 Interrupt-driven I/O
 The processor issues an I/O command on behalf of a process
 If non-blocking – processor continues to execute instructions from the process that
issued the I/O command
 If blocking – the next instruction the processor executes is from the OS, which will put
the current process in a blocked state and schedule another process

 Direct Memory Access (DMA)

 A DMA module controls the exchange of data between main memory and an I/O
module
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 Table 11.1
I/O Techniques

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 Evolution of the I/O
Function
• Processor directly controls a peripheral device
1

• A controller or I/O module is added

2

• Same configuration as step 2, but now interrupts are employed

3

• The I/O module is given direct control of memory via DMA

4

• The I/O module is enhanced to become a separate processor, with a

5 specialized instruction set tailored for I/O

• The I/O module has a local memory of its own and is, in fact, a
6 computer in its own right

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 Design Objectives
Efficiency Generality
 Major effort in I/O design  Desirable to handle all devices in a
uniform manner
 Important because I/O operations
often form a bottleneck  Applies to the way processes view
I/O devices and the way the
 Most I/O devices are extremely operating system manages I/O
slow compared with main devices and operations
memory and the processor
 Diversity of devices makes it
 The area that has received the difficult to achieve true generality
most attention is disk I/O
 Use a hierarchical, modular
approach to the design of the I/O
function
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 Buffering
 To avoid overheads and inefficiencies, it is sometimes convenient to perform
input transfers in advance of requests being made, and to perform output
transfers some time after the request is made

Block-oriented device Stream-oriented device

• Stores information in blocks • Transfers data in and out as a

that are usually of fixed size stream of bytes
• Transfers are made one block • No block structure
at a time • Terminals, printers,
• Possible to reference data by communications ports, mouse
its block number and other pointing devices,
• Disks and USB keys are and most other devices that
examples are not secondary storage are
examples

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  Without a buffer, the OS
directly accesses the device
No Buffer when it needs

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  The simplest type of support that
the operating system can provide

Single Buffer  When a user process issues an

I/O request, the OS assigns a
buffer in the system portion of
main memory to the operation

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 Single Buffer
 Input transfers are made to the system buffer
 Reading ahead/anticipated input
 Is done in the expectation that the block will eventually be needed
 When the transfer is complete, the process moves the block into user space and
immediately requests another block

 Approach generally provides a speedup compared to the lack of system buffering

 The user process can be processing one block of data while the next block is being read in
 The OS is able to swap the process out because the input operation is taking place in
system memory rather than user process memory

 Disadvantages:
 Complicates the logic in the operating system
 Swapping logic is also affected

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  Assigning two system buffers to
the operation

Double Buffer
 A process now transfers data to or
from one buffer while the
operating system empties or fills
the other buffer

 Also known as buffer swapping

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  When more than two buffers
are used, the collection of
buffers is itself referred to as a

Circular Buffer 
circular buffer

Each individual buffer is one

unit in the circular buffer

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© 2017 Pearson Education, Inc., Hoboken, NJ. All rights reserved.
  The actual details of disk I/O

Disk
operation depend on the:
 Computer system

Performance 


Operating system
Nature of the I/O channel

Parameters and disk controller

hardware

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 Disk Performance
Parameters
 When the disk drive is operating, the disk is rotating at constant speed
 To read or write the head must be positioned at the desired track and at the
beginning of the desired sector on that track
 Track selection involves moving the head in a movable-head system or
electronically selecting one head on a fixed-head system
 On a movable-head system the time it takes to position the head at the
track is known as seek time
 The time it takes for the beginning of the sector to reach the head is
known as rotational delay
 The sum of the seek time and the rotational delay equals the access time
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 Seek Time
 The time required to move the disk arm to the required track
 Consists of two key components:
 The initial startup time
 The time taken to traverse the tracks that have to be crossed once the access
arm is up to speed

 Settling time
 Time after positioning the head over the target track until track identification is
confirmed

 Much improvement comes from smaller and lighter disk components

 A typical average seek time on contemporary hard disks is under
10ms
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 Disk Performance
 Rotational delay
 The time required for the addressed area of the disk to rotate into a
position where it is accessible by the read/write head
 Disks rotate at speeds ranging from 3,6000 rpm (for handheld devices
such as digital cameras) up to 15,000 rpm

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 Table 11.3 Disk Scheduling Algorithms
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 First-In, First-Out (FIFO)
 Processes in sequential order
 Fair to all processes
 Approximates random scheduling in performance if
there are many processes competing for the disk

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 Priority (PRI)
 Control of the scheduling is outside the control of disk management
software
 Goal is not to optimize disk utilization but to meet other objectives
 Short batch jobs and interactive jobs are given higher priority
 Provides good interactive response time
 Longer jobs may have to wait an excessively long time
 A poor policy for database systems

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 Shortest Service
Time First
(SSTF)
 Always choose the minimum
seek time
 Select the disk I/O request
that requires the least
movement of the disk arm
from its current position

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 SCAN
 Also known as the elevator algorithm
 Arm moves in one direction only
 Satisfies all outstanding requests until it
reaches the last track in that direction then
the direction is reversed

 Favors jobs whose requests are for tracks

nearest to both innermost and outermost
tracks and favors the latest-arriving jobs

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  Restricts scanning to one direction
C-SCAN only
 When the last track has been
(Circular SCAN) visited in one direction, the arm is
returned to the opposite end of the
disk and the scan begins again

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 N-Step-SCAN
 Segments the disk request queue into subqueues of length N
 Subqueues are processed one at a time, using SCAN
 While a queue is being processed new requests must be added to some
other queue
 If fewer than N requests are available at the end of a scan, all of them
are processed with the next scan

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 FSCAN
 Uses two subqueues
 When a scan begins, all of the requests are in one of the queues, with
the other empty
 During scan, all new requests are put into the other queue
 Service of new requests is deferred until all of the old requests have
been processed

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