Unit – 5 Case Studies: Linux/Unix

(Chapter-20)

Dept. of CSE, CBIT, @2023 BE V Sem CSE-1

 Case Studies and OS Abstractions
 Linux/Unix OS Design and Architecture
 Unix Shell
 Services – User Perspective
 Representation of Files in Unix
 System Processes and their structure
 I/O System
 Memory Management in Unix
 Unix Process Management
 File Management
 IPC and Network related System Calls

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 History
 Linux is a modern, free and Open Source Operating system based on
UNIX standards
 First developed as a small but self-contained kernel in 1991 by Linus
Torvalds, with the major design goal of UNIX compatibility, released as
open source
 Its history has been one of collaboration by many users from all around the
world, corresponding almost exclusively over the Internet
 It has been designed to run efficiently and reliably on common PC
hardware, but also runs on a variety of other platforms
 The core Linux operating system kernel is entirely original, but it can run
much existing free UNIX software, resulting in an entire UNIX-compatible
operating system free from proprietary code
 Linux system has many, varying Linux distributions including the kernel,
applications, and management tools

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 The Linux Kernel
 Version 0.01 (May 1991) had no networking, ran only on 80386-
compatible Intel processors and on PC hardware, had extremely limited
device-drive support, and supported only the Minix file system
 Linux 1.0 (March 1994) included these new features:
• Support for UNIX’s standard TCP/IP networking protocols
• BSD-compatible socket interface for networking programming
• Device-driver support for running IP over an Ethernet
• Enhanced file system
• Support for a range of SCSI controllers for
high-performance disk access
• Extra hardware support
 Version 1.2 (March 1995) was the final PC-only Linux kernel
 Kernels with odd version numbers are development kernels, those with
even numbers are production kernels

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 Linux kernel versions
 Released in June 1996, 2.0 added two major new capabilities:
• Support for multiple architectures, including a fully 64-bit native Alpha port
• Support for multiprocessor architectures
 Other new features included:
• Improved memory-management code
• Improved TCP/IP performance
• Support for internal kernel threads, for handling dependencies between
loadable modules, and for automatic loading of modules on demand
• Standardized configuration interface
 Available for Motorola 68000-series processors, Sun Sparc systems,
and for PC and PowerMac systems
 2.4 and 2.6 increased SMP support, added journaling file system,
preemptive kernel, 64-bit memory support; Latest 6.11.5
 3.0 released in 2011, 20th anniversary of Linux, improved virtualization
support, new page write-back facility, improved memory management,
new Completely Fair Scheduler

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 The Linux System
 Linux uses many tools developed as part of Berkeley’s BSD operating
system, MIT’s X Window System, and the Free Software Foundation's
GNU project
 The main system libraries were started by the GNU project, with
improvements provided by the Linux community
 Linux networking-administration tools were derived from 4.3BSD code;
recent BSD derivatives such as Free BSD have borrowed code from Linux
in return
 The Linux system is maintained by a loose network of developers
collaborating over the Internet, with a small number of public ftp sites
acting as de facto standard repositories
 File System Hierarchy Standard document maintained by the Linux
community to ensure compatibility across the various system components
• Specifies overall layout of a standard Linux file system, determines under which
directory names configuration files, libraries, system binaries, and run-time data
files should be stored

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 Linux Distributions
 Standard, precompiled sets of packages, or distributions, include the basic
Linux system, system installation and management utilities, and ready-to-
install packages of common UNIX tools
 The first distributions managed these packages by simply providing a means
of unpacking all the files into the appropriate places; modern distributions
include advanced package management
 Linux Distributions includes
• Early distributions
 SLS (Softlanding Linux System)
 Slackware
• Red Hat popular commercial
• Debian popular non-commercial
• Canonical and
• SuSE
 The RPM Package file format permits compatibility among the various Linux
distributions

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 Linux Licensing
 The Linux kernel is distributed under the GNU General Public License
(GPL), the terms of which are set out by the Free Software Foundation
• Not public domain, in that not all rights are waived
 Anyone using Linux, or creating their own derivative of Linux, may not
make the derived product proprietary; software released under the GPL
may not be redistributed as a binary-only product
• Can sell distributions, but must offer the source code too

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 Design Principles
 Linux is a multiuser, multitasking system with a full set of UNIX-
compatible tools
 Its file system adheres to traditional UNIX semantics, and it fully
implements the standard UNIX networking model
 Main design goals are speed, efficiency, and standardization
 Linux is designed to be compliant with the relevant POSIX documents; at
least two Linux distributions have achieved official POSIX certification
• Supports Pthreads and a subset of POSIX real-time process control
 The Linux programming interface adheres to the SVR4 UNIX semantics,
rather than to BSD behavior

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 UNIX Shell
 A command line interpreter or shell that
provides a command line user interface
(CLI) for UNIX-like operating systems.
 The shell is both interactive command
language and a scripting language, and is
used by the operating system to control
the execution of the system using shell
scripts.
 Several shells
• Bourne Shell (bs, bash) Steve Bourne
• Korn shell – Dave Korn, combines the features of
Bourne and C shell
• C shell - Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems,
popular on BSD systems
 Provides set of commands
 File related
 Process related
 IPC related
 Security and information related

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 UNIX Services – User perspective
 File and directory related
• Ls, cp, mv, rm, touch
• mkdir, rmdir, pwd, cd
• chmod, chown, chgrp
• Cat – concatenate files
• less, more, head, tail – used to print first/last N line of a file
• grep, sort, wc, cut, locate, find, df, tar
 Process related
• ps, top, kill, nice, bg, fg, etc
 Other commands
• uptime, init, reboot, w, who, whois, whoami, crontab, ipcs, lsb_release, uname,
ssh, telnet, wget, ping, arp, ifconfig, traceroute etc.
• free, df, vmstat

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/basic-shell-commands-in-linux/

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 Components of a Linux System

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 Components of a Linux System
 Like most UNIX implementations, Linux is composed of three main bodies
of code;
• Kernel
• System Libraries
• System Utilities and user mode programs
 Kernel: is responsible for maintaining the important abstractions of the
operating system
• Kernel code executes in kernel mode with full access to all the physical
resources of the computer
• All kernel code and data structures are kept in the same single address space

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 Components of a Linux System (Cont.)
 System libraries: define a standard set of functions through which
applications interact with the kernel, and which implement much of the
operating-system functionality that does not need the full privileges of
kernel code
 System utilities: perform individual specialized management tasks
 User-mode programs rich and varied, including multiple shells like the
bourne-again (bash)

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 Kernel Modules
 Sections of kernel code that can be compiled, loaded, and unloaded
independent of the rest of the kernel.
 A kernel module may typically implement a device driver, a file system, or a
networking protocol
 The module interface allows third parties to write and distribute, on their own
terms, device drivers or file systems that could not be distributed under the
GPL.
 Kernel modules allow a Linux system to be set up with a standard, minimal
kernel, without any extra device drivers built in.
 Four components to Linux module support:
• module-management system
• module loader and unloader
• driver-registration system
• conflict-resolution mechanism

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 Module Management
 Supports loading modules into memory and letting them talk to the rest of
the kernel
 Module loading is split into two separate sections:
• Managing sections of module code in kernel memory
• Handling symbols that modules are allowed to reference
 The module requestor manages loading requested, but currently unloaded,
modules; it also regularly queries the kernel to see whether a dynamically
loaded module is still in use, and will unload it when it is no longer actively
needed

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 Driver Registration
 Allows modules to tell the rest of the kernel that a new driver has become
available
 The kernel maintains dynamic tables of all known drivers, and provides a
set of routines to allow drivers to be added to or removed from these
tables at any time
 Registration tables include the following items:
• Device drivers – (devices printers, terminals, mice, disks etc)
• File systems – ( VFS calling routines, NFS etc.)
• Network protocols- ( TCP, or a new set of packet-filtering rules for a
network firewall)
• Binary format ( way of recognizing,, loading and executing a new
type of executable file)

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 Conflict Resolution
 Is a mechanism that allows different device drivers to reserve hardware
resources and to protect those resources from accidental use by another driver.
 The conflict resolution module aims to:
• Prevent modules from clashing over access to hardware resources
• Prevent autoprobes from interfering with existing device drivers
• Resolve conflicts with multiple drivers trying to access the same hardware:
1. Kernel maintains list of allocated HW resources

2. Driver reserves resources with kernel database first

3. Reservation request rejected if resource not available

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 Process Management
 UNIX process management separates the creation of processes and the
running of a new program into two distinct operations.
• The fork() system call creates a new process
• A new program is run after a call to exec()
 Under UNIX, a process encompasses all the information that the OS must
maintain to track the context of a single execution of a single program
 Under Linux, process properties fall into three groups: the process’s
• identity,
• environment, and
• context

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 Process Identity
 Process ID (PID) - The unique identifier for the process; used to
specify processes to the operating system when an application makes
a system call to signal, modify, or wait for another process
 Credentials - Each process must have an associated user ID and
one or more group IDs that determine the process’s rights to access
system resources and files
 Personality - Not traditionally found on UNIX systems, but under
Linux each process has an associated personality identifier that can
slightly modify the semantics of certain system calls
• Used primarily by emulation libraries to request that system calls
be compatible with certain specific flavors of UNIX
 Namespace – Specific view of file system hierarchy
• Most processes share common namespace and operate on a
shared file-system hierarchy
• But each can have unique file-system hierarchy with its own root
directory and set of mounted file systems

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 Process Environment
 The process’s environment is inherited from its parent, and is
composed of two null-terminated vectors:
• The argument vector lists the command-line arguments used to
invoke the running program; conventionally starts with the name of
the program itself.
• The environment vector is a list of “NAME=VALUE” pairs that
associates named environment variables with arbitrary textual
values.
 Passing environment variables among processes and inheriting
variables by a process’s children are flexible means of passing
information to components of the user-mode system software.
 The environment-variable mechanism provides a customization of the
operating system that can be set on a per-process basis, rather than
being configured for the system as a whole.

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 Process Context
 The (constantly changing) state of a running program at any point in
time
 The scheduling context is the most important part of the process
context; it is the information that the scheduler needs to suspend and
restart the process
 The kernel maintains accounting information about the resources
currently being consumed by each process, and the total resources
consumed by the process in its lifetime so far
 The file table is an array of pointers to kernel file structures
• When making file I/O system calls, processes refer to files by their
index into this table, the file descriptor (fd)

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 Process Context (Cont.)
 Whereas the file table lists the existing open files, the
file-system context applies to requests to open new files
• The current root and default directories to be used for new file
searches are stored here
 The signal-handler table defines the routine in the process’s address
space to be called when specific signals arrive
 The virtual-memory context of a process describes the full contents
of the its private address space

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 Processes and Threads
 Linux uses the same internal representation for processes and threads; a
thread is simply a new process that happens to share the same address
space as its parent
• Both are called tasks by Linux
 A distinction is only made when a new thread is created by the clone()
system call
• fork() creates a new task with its own entirely new task context
• clone() creates a new task with its own identity, but that is allowed to
share the data structures of its parent
 Using clone() gives an application fine-grained control over exactly what
is shared between two threads

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 Scheduling
 The job of allocating CPU time to different tasks within an operating
system
 While scheduling is normally thought of as the running and interrupting
of processes, in Linux, scheduling also includes the running of the
various kernel tasks
 Running kernel tasks encompasses both tasks that are requested by a
running process and tasks that execute internally on behalf of a device
driver
 As of 2.5, new scheduling algorithm – preemptive, priority-based,
known as O(1)
• Real-time range
• nice value
• Had challenges with interactive performance
 2.6 introduced Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)

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 CFS
 Eliminates traditional, common idea of time slice
 Instead all tasks allocated portion of processor’s time
 CFS calculates how long a process should run as a function of total
number of tasks
 N runnable tasks means each gets 1/N of processor’s time
 Then weights each task with its nice value
• Smaller nice value -> higher weight (higher priority)

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 CFS (Cont.)
 Then each task run with for time proportional to task’s weight divided
by total weight of all runnable tasks
 Configurable variable target latency is desired interval during which
each task should run at least once
• Consider simple case of 2 runnable tasks with equal weight and
target latency of 10ms – each then runs for 5ms
 If 10 runnable tasks, each runs for 1ms
 Minimum granularity ensures each run has reasonable
amount of time (which actually violates fairness idea)

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 Kernel Synchronization
 A request for kernel-mode execution can occur in two ways:
• A running program may request an operating system service,
either explicitly via a system call, or implicitly, for example, when a
page fault occurs
• A device driver may deliver a hardware interrupt that causes the
CPU to start executing a kernel-defined handler for that interrupt
 Kernel synchronization requires a framework that will allow the kernel’s
critical sections to run without interruption by another critical section

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 Kernel Synchronization (Cont.)
 Linux uses two techniques to protect critical sections:
1. Normal kernel code is nonpreemptible (until 2.6)
– when a time interrupt is received while a process is executing a kernel
system service routine, the kernel’s need_resched flag is set so that
the scheduler will run once the system call has completed and control is
about to be returned to user mode
2. The second technique applies to critical sections that occur in an interrupt
service routines
– By using the processor’s interrupt control hardware to disable interrupts
during a critical section, the kernel guarantees that it can proceed without
the risk of concurrent access of shared data structures
• Provides spin locks, semaphores, and reader-writer versions of both
 Behavior modified if on single processor or multi:

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 Kernel Synchronization (Cont.)
 To avoid performance penalties, Linux’s kernel uses a synchronization
architecture that allows long critical sections to run without having
interrupts disabled for the critical section’s entire duration
 Interrupt service routines are separated into a top half and a bottom
half
• The top half is a normal interrupt service routine, and runs with
recursive interrupts disabled
• The bottom half is run, with all interrupts enabled, by a miniature
scheduler that ensures that bottom halves never interrupt
themselves
• This architecture is completed by a mechanism for disabling
selected bottom halves while executing normal, foreground kernel
code

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 Interrupt Protection Levels

 Each level may be interrupted by code running at a higher level, but

will never be interrupted by code running at the same or a lower level
 User processes can always be preempted by another process when
a time-sharing scheduling interrupt occurs

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 Symmetric Multiprocessing
 Linux 2.0 was the first Linux kernel to support SMP hardware;
separate processes or threads can execute in parallel on separate
processors
 Until version 2.2, to preserve the kernel’s nonpreemptible
synchronization requirements, SMP imposes the restriction, via a
single kernel spinlock, that only one processor at a time may execute
kernel-mode code
 Later releases implement more scalability by splitting single spinlock
into multiple locks, each protecting a small subset of kernel data
structures
 Version 3.0 adds even more fine-grained locking, processor affinity,
and load-balancing

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 Memory Management
 Linux’s physical memory-management system deals with allocating and
freeing pages, groups of pages, and small blocks of memory
 It has additional mechanisms for handling virtual memory, memory
mapped into the address space of running processes
 Splits memory into four different zones due to hardware characteristics
• Architecture specific, for example on x86:

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 Managing Physical Memory
 The page allocator allocates and frees all physical pages; it can allocate
ranges of physically-contiguous pages on request
 The allocator uses a buddy-heap algorithm to keep track of available
physical pages
• Each allocatable memory region is paired with an adjacent partner
• Whenever two allocated partner regions are both freed up they are
combined to form a larger region
• If a small memory request cannot be satisfied by allocating an existing
small free region, then a larger free region will be subdivided into two
partners to satisfy the request

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 Managing Physical Memory (Cont.)
 Memory allocations in the Linux kernel occur either statically (drivers
reserve a contiguous area of memory during system boot time) or
dynamically (via the page allocator)
 Also uses slab allocator for kernel memory
 Page cache and virtual memory system also manage physical
memory
• Page cache is kernel’s main cache for files and main mechanism
for I/O to block devices
• Page cache stores entire pages of file contents for local and
network file I/O

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 Splitting of Memory in a Buddy Heap

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 Slab Allocator in Linux

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 Virtual Memory
 The VM system maintains the address space visible to each process:
It creates pages of virtual memory on demand, and manages the
loading of those pages from disk or their swapping back out to disk as
required.
 The VM manager maintains two separate views of a process’s
address space:
• A logical view describing instructions concerning the layout of the
address space
 The address space consists of a set of non-overlapping
regions, each representing a continuous, page-aligned subset
of the address space
• A physical view of each address space which is stored in the
hardware page tables for the process

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 Virtual Memory (Cont.)
 Virtual memory regions are characterized by:
• The backing store, which describes from where the pages for a
region come; regions are usually backed by a file or by nothing
(demand-zero memory)
• The region’s reaction to writes (page sharing or copy-on-write
 The kernel creates a new virtual address space
1. When a process runs a new program with the exec() system
call
2. Upon creation of a new process by the fork() system call

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 Virtual Memory (Cont.)
 On executing a new program, the process is given a new, completely
empty virtual-address space; the program-loading routines populate
the address space with virtual-memory regions
 Creating a new process with fork() involves creating a complete
copy of the existing process’s virtual address space
• The kernel copies the parent process’s VMA descriptors, then
creates a new set of page tables for the child
• The parent’s page tables are copied directly into the child’s, with
the reference count of each page covered being incremented
• After the fork, the parent and child share the same physical pages
of memory in their address spaces

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 Swapping and Paging
 The VM paging system relocates pages of memory from physical
memory out to disk when the memory is needed for something else
 The VM paging system can be divided into two sections:
• The pageout-policy algorithm decides which pages to write out to
disk, and when
• The paging mechanism actually carries out the transfer, and
pages data back into physical memory as needed
• Can page out to either swap device or normal files
• Bitmap used to track used blocks in swap space kept in physical
memory
• Allocator uses next-fit algorithm to try to write contiguous runs

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 Kernel Virtual Memory
 The Linux kernel reserves a constant, architecture-dependent region of
the virtual address space of every process for its own internal use
 This kernel virtual-memory area contains two regions:
• A static area that contains page table references to every available
physical page of memory in the system, so that there is a simple
translation from physical to virtual addresses when running kernel
code
• The reminder of the reserved section is not reserved for any
specific purpose; its page-table entries can be modified to point to
any other areas of memory

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 Executing and Loading User Programs
 Linux maintains a table of functions for loading programs; it gives each
function the opportunity to try loading the given file when an exec
system call is made
 The registration of multiple loader routines allows Linux to support both
the ELF and a.out binary formats
 Initially, binary-file pages are mapped into virtual memory
• Only when a program tries to access a given page will a page fault
result in that page being loaded into physical memory
 An ELF-format binary file consists of a header followed by several
page-aligned sections
• The ELF loader works by reading the header and mapping the
sections of the file into separate regions of virtual memory

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 Memory Layout for ELF Programs

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 Static and Dynamic Linking
 A program whose necessary library functions are embedded directly in
the program’s executable binary file is statically linked to its libraries
 The main disadvantage of static linkage is that every program
generated must contain copies of exactly the same common system
library functions
 Dynamic linking is more efficient in terms of both physical memory and
disk-space usage because it loads the system libraries into memory
only once

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 Static and Dynamic Linking (Cont.)
 Linux implements dynamic linking in user mode through special linker
library
• Every dynamically linked program contains small statically linked
function called when process starts
• Maps the link library into memory
• Link library determines dynamic libraries required by process and
names of variables and functions needed
• Maps libraries into middle of virtual memory and resolves
references to symbols contained in the libraries
• Shared libraries compiled to be position-independent code (PIC)
so can be loaded anywhere

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 File Systems
 To the user, Linux’s file system appears as a hierarchical directory tree
obeying UNIX semantics
 Internally, the kernel hides implementation details and manages the
multiple different file systems via an abstraction layer, that is, the
virtual file system (VFS)
 The Linux VFS is designed around object-oriented principles and is
composed of four components:
• A set of definitions that define what a file object is allowed to look
like
 The inode object structure represent an individual file
 The file object represents an open file
 The superblock object represents an entire file system
 A dentry object represents an individual directory entry

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 File Systems (Cont.)
 To the user, Linux’s file system appears as a hierarchical directory tree
obeying UNIX semantics
 Internally, the kernel hides implementation details and manages the
multiple different file systems via an abstraction layer, that is, the virtual
file system (VFS)
 The Linux VFS is designed around object-oriented principles and layer
of software to manipulate those objects with a set of operations on the
objects
• For example for the file object operations include (from struct
file_operations in /usr/include/linux/fs.h
int open(. . .) — Open a file
ssize t read(. . .) — Read from a file
ssize t write(. . .) — Write to a file
int mmap(. . .) — Memory-map a file

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 The Linux ext3 File System
 ext3 is standard on disk file system for Linux
• Uses a mechanism similar to that of BSD Fast File System (FFS)
for locating data blocks belonging to a specific file
• Supersedes older extfs, ext2 file systems
• Work underway on ext4 adding features like extents
• Of course, many other file system choices with Linux distros

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 The Linux ext3 File System (Cont.)
 The main differences between ext2fs and FFS concern their disk
allocation policies
• In ffs, the disk is allocated to files in blocks of 8Kb, with blocks
being subdivided into fragments of 1Kb to store small files or
partially filled blocks at the end of a file
• ext3 does not use fragments; it performs its allocations in smaller
units
 The default block size on ext3 varies as a function of total size
of file system with support for 1, 2, 4 and 8 KB blocks
• ext3 uses cluster allocation policies designed to place logically
adjacent blocks of a file into physically adjacent blocks on disk, so
that it can submit an I/O request for several disk blocks as a single
operation on a block group
• Maintains bit map of free blocks in a block group, searches for free
byte to allocate at least 8 blocks at a time

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.50 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Ext2fs Block-Allocation Policies

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.51 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Journaling
 ext3 implements journaling, with file system updates first written to a
log file in the form of transactions
• Once in log file, considered committed
• Over time, log file transactions replayed over file system to put
changes in place
 On system crash, some transactions might be in journal but not yet
placed into file system
• Must be completed once system recovers
• No other consistency checking is needed after a crash (much
faster than older methods)
 Improves write performance on hard disks by turning random I/O into
sequential I/O

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.52 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 The Linux Proc File System
 The proc file system does not store data, rather, its contents are
computed on demand according to user file I/O requests
 proc must implement a directory structure, and the file contents
within; it must then define a unique and persistent inode number for
each directory and files it contains
• It uses this inode number to identify just what operation is
required when a user tries to read from a particular file inode or
perform a lookup in a particular directory inode
• When data is read from one of these files, proc collects the
appropriate information, formats it into text form and places it into
the requesting process’s read buffer

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.53 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Input and Output
 The Linux device-oriented file system accesses disk storage through
two caches:
• Data is cached in the page cache, which is unified with the virtual
memory system
• Metadata is cached in the buffer cache, a separate cache indexed
by the physical disk block
 Linux splits all devices into three classes:
• Block devices allow random access to completely independent,
fixed size blocks of data
• Character devices include most other devices; they don’t need to
support the functionality of regular files
• Network devices are interfaced via the kernel’s networking
subsystem

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.54 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Block Devices
 Provide the main interface to all disk devices in a system
 The block buffer cache serves two main purposes:
• it acts as a pool of buffers for active I/O
• it serves as a cache for completed I/O
 The request manager manages the reading and writing of buffer
contents to and from a block device driver
 Kernel 2.6 introduced Completely Fair Queueing (CFQ)
• Now the default scheduler
• Fundamentally different from elevator algorithms
• Maintains set of lists, one for each process by default
• Uses C-SCAN algorithm, with round robin between all outstanding
I/O from all processes
• Four blocks from each process put on at once

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.55 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Device-Driver Block Structure

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.56 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Character Devices

 A device driver which does not offer random access to fixed blocks of
data
 A character device driver must register a set of functions which
implement the driver’s various file I/O operations
 The kernel performs almost no preprocessing of a file read or write
request to a character device, but simply passes on the request to the
device
 The main exception to this rule is the special subset of character
device drivers which implement terminal devices, for which the kernel
maintains a standard interface

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 Character Devices (Cont.)

 Line discipline is an interpreter for the information from the terminal

device
• The most common line discipline is tty discipline, which glues the
terminal’s data stream onto standard input and output streams of
user’s running processes, allowing processes to communicate
directly with the user’s terminal
• Several processes may be running simultaneously, tty line
discipline responsible for attaching and detaching terminal’s input
and output from various processes connected to it as processes
are suspended or awakened by user
• Other line disciplines also are implemented have nothing to do with
I/O to user process – i.e., PPP and SLIP networking protocols

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.58 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Interprocess Communication
 Like UNIX, Linux informs processes that an event has occurred via
signals
 There is a limited number of signals, and they cannot carry
information: Only the fact that a signal occurred is available to a
process
 The Linux kernel does not use signals to communicate with processes
with are running in kernel mode, rather, communication within the
kernel is accomplished via scheduling states and wait_queue
structures
 Also implements System V Unix semaphores
• Process can wait for a signal or a semaphore
• Semaphores scale better
• Operations on multiple semaphores can be atomic

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.59 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Passing Data Between Processes

 The pipe mechanism allows a child process to inherit a communication

channel to its parent, data written to one end of the pipe can be read a
the other
 Shared memory offers an extremely fast way of communicating; any
data written by one process to a shared memory region can be read
immediately by any other process that has mapped that region into its
address space
 To obtain synchronization, however, shared memory must be used in
conjunction with another Interprocess-communication mechanism

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.60 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Network Structure

 Networking is a key area of functionality for Linux

• It supports the standard Internet protocols for UNIX to UNIX communications
• It also implements protocols native to non-UNIX operating systems, in
particular, protocols used on PC networks, such as Appletalk and IPX
 Internally, networking in the Linux kernel is implemented by three layers
of software:
• The socket interface
• Protocol drivers
• Network device drivers
 Most important set of protocols in the Linux networking system is the
internet protocol suite
• It implements routing between different hosts anywhere on the network
• On top of the routing protocol are built the UDP, TCP and ICMP protocols
 Packets also pass to firewall management for filtering based on
firewall chains of rules

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.61 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Security

 The pluggable authentication modules (PAM) system is available

under Linux
 PAM is based on a shared library that can be used by any system
component that needs to authenticate users
 Access control under UNIX systems, including Linux, is performed
through the use of unique numeric identifiers (uid and gid)
 Access control is performed by assigning objects a protections mask,
which specifies which access modes—read, write, or execute—are to
be granted to processes with owner, group, or world access

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.62 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Security (Cont.)

 Linux augments the standard UNIX setuid mechanism in two ways:

• It implements the POSIX specification’s saved user-id
mechanism, which allows a process to repeatedly drop and
reacquire its effective uid
• It has added a process characteristic that grants just a subset of
the rights of the effective uid
 Linux provides another mechanism that allows a client to selectively
pass access to a single file to some server process without granting it
any other privileges

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.63 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 References
 https://brightsec.com/blog/code-injection/

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 16.64 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018