Chapter-4

Device- Management

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 Introduction
Devices usually refer to physical/hardware devices such as computers, laptops,
servers, mobile phones, and more.
Device management is the process of controlling the Input/Output devices like
disk, microphone, keyboard, printer, magnetic tape, USB ports, camcorder,
scanner, other accessories, and supporting units.
The operating system handles communication with the devices via their
drivers.
Device drivers are software modules that can be plugged into an OS to handle
a particular device.
Operating System takes help from device drivers to handle all I/O devices.
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 Introduction Con’t…
The system has multiple devices, to handle these physical or virtual devices, the OS requires a
separate program known as a device controller.
The Device Controller works like an interface between a device and a device driver to convert serial
bit stream to block of bytes and perform error correction as necessary.
The fundamentals of I/O devices may be divided into three categories:
Block Device: It stores data in fixed-size blocks, each with its unique address.

For example- Disks.

Character Device: It transmits or accepts a stream of characters, none of which can be addressed
individually. For example, keyboards, printers, etc.
Network Device: It is used for transmitting the data packets.
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 Functions of the device management in the operating system
An Operating System does the following activities in device management:
• Keeps tracks of all devices by using a Program responsible for this task
which is called I/O controller.
• It decides which process gets the device when and for how much time.
• It connects devices to various programs in efficient way without error.
• Allocates the device in the efficient way.
• De-allocates devices when they are no longer in use.

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 Types of devices
There are three types of Operating system peripheral devices: dedicated,
shared, and virtual.
Dedicated Device: some devices are allocated or assigned to process only one
job at a time until that job releases them.
 Devices such as plotters, printers, tape drives, floppy disks and other similar
devices require such an allocation mechanism because it will be inconvenient if
multiple people share them simultaneously.
Shared Devices : are assigned to multiple processes by interleaving their
requests. For example, hard disk it is shared, but interleaving between different
processes requests.

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Types of devices Con’t…
Virtual Devices : a hybrid of the two devices, and they are dedicated devices
that have been transformed into shared devices.
 For example, a printer can be transformed into a shareable device by using a
spooling program that redirects all print requests to a disk.

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Characteristics of serial and parallel devices
Serial Transmission Parallel Transmission
The data is transmitted one bit at a Various data bits are
time over a single wire or channel. simultaneously transmitted
together.
Requires a single line to Requires multiple lines
communicate and transfer data.
Serial transmission is not time- Parallel transmission is time-sensitive
sensitive
Serial transmission is reliable for Parallel transmission is used for a
transferring data to longer distance. limited distance, provides higher speed.
Slow Fast
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 Serial Transmission vs Parallel Transmission

Figure 4.1: Serial Transmission Figure 4.2: Parallel Transmission

Example: Data transfer between Data transfer between a computer to a printer

computer to a modem

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Buffering strategies
The buffer is an area in the main memory used to store or hold data
temporarily.
 The act of storing data temporarily in the buffer while it is being transferred
between two devices or between a device and an application known as
buffering.
 I/O buffering is the process of temporarily storing data that is passing between
a processor and a peripheral devices.

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 Why Buffering is required?
Buffering is done for three reasons:
 To manage with a speed mismatch between the sender and receiver of a
data stream.
 To adapt between devices that have different data-transfer sizes.
 To support copy semantics for application I/O.

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 How Buffering Works?
In an operating system, buffer works in the following way :

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 Types of Buffering
 There are three main types of buffering in the operating system:
1. Single buffering:
 Only one buffer is used to transfer the data between two devices.
 The sender produces one block of data into the buffer. After that, the receiver
receives the buffer.
 Only when the buffer is empty, the processor again produces the data.

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Types of Buffering Con’t…
2. Double buffering:
 Two buffers are used in the place of one.
 The sender produces one buffer while the receiver consumes another buffer
simultaneously. So, the sender not needs to wait for filling the buffer.
 It is also known as buffer swapping.

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Types of Buffering Con’t…
3. Circular buffering:
 When more than two buffers are used, the buffers collection is called
a circular buffer.
 Each buffer is being one unit in the circular buffer.
 The data transfer rate will increase using the circular buffer rather than the
double buffering.

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 Direct memory access(DMA)
Direct memory access is a method that allows an input/output (I/O) device to
send or receive data directly to or from the main memory, by passing the CPU to
speed up memory operations.
This process is managed by a chip known as a DMA controller (DMAC).

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Operation of the DMA Controller
1. CPU programs DMA controller by setting its registers to know what to
transfer and where. It also issues a command to the disk controller telling it
to read data from the disk into its internal buffer and verify the checksum.
2. DMA controller initiates the transfer by issuing a read request over the bus
to the disk controller.
3. Write to memory bus cycle.
4. When the write is complete, the disk controller sends an acknowledgement
signal to the DMA controller, also over the bus.
5. DMA controller increments the memory address to use and decrements the
byte count.
6. DMA controller interrupts the CPU for process completion.
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Recovery from failure
Device recovery is a process to recover inoperable devices due to incorrect or
bad storage state.

This is done by using a Bootable Recover Assist Media or a Bootable Backup

Media.

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 END OF CHAPTER -FOUR

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