Chapter 2: Operating-System

Services

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

 Identify services provided by an operating system

 Illustrate how system calls are used to provide operating system
services.
 Define the factors required to design a new OS
 How to troubleshoot any operating system?

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 Chapter 2: Outline

 Operating System Services

 System Calls
• Types of System Calls
• Standard C Example
 Why Applications are Operating System Specific
 OS Design and Implementation
• Policy and Mechanism
 Building and Booting an Operating System
 Operating System Debugging
• Performance tuning
• Tracing

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 Operating System Services

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 Operating System Services

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 Operating System Services
 Operating systems provide an environment for the execution of
programs and services to programs and users
 One set of operating-system services provides functions that are
helpful to the user:
• User interface - Almost all operating systems have a user
interface (UI).
 Varies between Command-Line (CLI), Graphics User
Interface (GUI), touch-screen
• Program execution - The system must be able to load a program
into memory and to run that program, end execution, either
normally or abnormally (indicating error)
• I/O operations - A running program may require I/O, which may
involve a file or an I/O device
• File-system manipulation - The file system is of particular
interest. Programs need to read and write files and directories,
create and delete them, search them, list file Information,
permission management.

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 Operating System Services (Cont.)

 Communications – Processes may exchange information, on the

same computer or between computers over a network
• Communications may be via shared memory or through message
passing (packets moved by the OS)
• Resource allocation
• Resource allocation to concurrently running jobs
• Resources such as CPU cycles, main memory, file storage etc.
 Accounting
Track usage of computer resources
For billing or simply for accumulating usage statistics

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 Operating System Services (Cont.)
 Error detection – OS needs to be constantly aware of possible errors
• May occur in the CPU and memory hardware, in I/O devices, in
user program
• For each type of error, OS should take the appropriate action to
ensure correct and consistent computing
• Debugging facilities can greatly enhance the user’s and
programmer’s abilities to use the system efficiently
 Protection and security
– Protect access to system resources is controlled
– Security from the outsiders, e.g., user authentication

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 System Services (Cont.)
 Background Services
• Launch at boot time
Some for system startup, then terminate

 Some from system boot to shutdown

• Provide facilities like disk checking, process scheduling, error

logging, printing
• Run in user context not kernel context
• Known as services, subsystems, daemons
 Application programs
• Don’t pertain to system
• Run by users
• Not typically considered part of OS
• Launched by command line, mouse click, finger poke

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 Overview of Services in typical
Windows O.S.

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 System Calls

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 System Calls

 Programmatic way in which computer program requests a service from

OS.
 User Mode is safer way to access resources and its happening
through calls. This context-switching is handled by OS through system
calls.
 Typically these calls are written as routines in a high-level language (C
or C++)
 Mostly accessed by programs via a high-level Application
Programming Interface (API) rather than direct system call use.
This interface is also known as SCI ( System call Interface)
 Three most common APIs are:
• Win32 API for Windows
• Portable OS interface(POSIX) API for POSIX-based systems
(including virtually all versions of UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS X)
• Java API for the Java virtual machine (JVM)

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 Example of System Calls
 System call sequence to copy the contents of one file to another
file

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 Example of Standard API

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 System Call Implementation
 Typically, a number is associated with each system call
• System-call interface maintains a table indexed according to
these numbers
 The system call interface invokes the intended system call in OS
kernel and returns status of the system call and any return values
 The caller need know nothing about how the system call is
implemented
• Just needs to obey API and understand what OS will do as a
result call
• Most details of OS interface hidden from programmer by API
 Managed by run-time support library (set of functions built into
libraries included with compiler)

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 API – System Call – OS Relationship

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 Standard C Library Example
 C program invoking printf() library call, which calls write() system call

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 Types of System Calls

 Process control
• create process, terminate process
• end, abort
• load, execute
• get process attributes, set process attributes
• wait for time
• wait event, signal event
• allocate and free memory
• Debugger for determining bugs, single-step execution
• Locks for managing access to shared data between processes

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 Types of System Calls (Cont.)
 File management
• create file, delete file
• open, close file
• read, write, reposition
• get and set file attributes
 Device management
• request device, release device
• read, write, reposition
• get device attributes, set device attributes
• logically attach or detach devices

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 Types of System Calls (Cont.)
 Information maintenance ( Metadata )
• get time or date, set time or date
• get system data, set system data
• get and set process, file, or device attributes
 Communications (IPC)
• create, delete communication connection
• send, receive messages if message passing model to host
name or process name
 From client to server
• Shared-memory model create and gain access to memory
regions
• transfer status information
• attach and detach remote devices

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 Types of System Calls (Cont.)
 Protection & Security
• Control access to resources
• Get and set permissions
• Allow and deny user access

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 Examples of Windows and Unix System Calls

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 Why Applications are Operating System Specific

 Apps compiled on one system usually not executable on other

operating systems
 Each operating system provides its own unique system calls
• Own file formats, etc.
 Apps can be multi-operating system
• Written in interpreted language like Python, Ruby, and interpreter
available on multiple operating systems
 Application Binary Interface (ABI) is architecture equivalent of API,
defines how different components of binary code can interface for a
given operating system on a given architecture, CPU, etc.

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 Operating System Design &
Implementation

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 Design and Implementation

 Design and Implementation of OS is not “solvable”, but some

approaches have proven successful
 Internal structure of different Operating Systems can vary widely
 Start the design by defining goals and specifications
 Affected by choice of hardware, type of system
 User goals and System goals
• User goals – operating system should be convenient to use,
easy to learn, reliable, safe, and fast
• System goals – operating system should be easy to design,
implement, and maintain, as well as flexible, reliable, error-free,
and efficient
 Specifying and designing an OS is highly creative task of software
engineering

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 Policy and Mechanism
 Policy: What needs to be done?
• Example: Interrupt after every 100 seconds
 Mechanism: How to do something?
• Example: timer
 Important principle: separate policy from mechanism
 The separation of policy from mechanism is a very
important principle, it allows maximum flexibility if policy
decisions are to be changed later.
• Example: change 100 to 200

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 Implementation
 Much variation
• Early OSes in assembly language
• Then system programming languages like Algol, PL/1
• Now C, C++
 Actually usually a mix of languages
• Lowest levels in assembly
• Main body in C
• Systems programs in C, C++, scripting languages like PERL,
Python, shell scripts
 More high-level language easier to port to other hardware
• But slower

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 Building and Booting an Operating System

 Operating systems generally designed to run on a class of systems

with variety of peripherals
 Commonly, operating system already installed on purchased
computer
• But can build and install some other operating systems
• If generating an operating system from scratch
 Write the operating system source code
 Configure the operating system for the system on which it will
run
 Compile the operating system
 Install the operating system
 Boot the computer and its new operating system

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 System Boot-Recap
 When power initialized on system, execution starts at a fixed memory
location
 Operating system must be made available to hardware so hardware
can start it
• Small piece of code – bootstrap loader, BIOS, stored in ROM or
EEPROM locates the kernel, loads it into memory, and starts it
 Common bootstrap loader, GRUB, allows selection of kernel from
multiple disks, versions, kernel options ( Linux Distros)
 Kernel loads and system is then running
 Boot loaders frequently allow various boot states, such as single user
mode

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 Operating System Debugging

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 Operating-System Debugging

 Debugging is finding and fixing errors, or bugs

 OS generate log files containing error information
 Failure of an application can generate core dump file capturing
memory of the process ( In Unix Like systems)
 Operating system failure can generate crash dump file containing
snapshot of process’s state at the time of crash. ( In windows)

Kernighan’s Law: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in

the first place.”

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 Performance Tuning
 Beyond crashes, performance tuning can optimize system
performance
• Profiling is periodic sampling of instruction pointer to look for
statistical trends
 Improve performance by removing bottlenecks
 OS must provide means of computing and displaying measures of
system behavior
 For example, Windows Task Manager

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 Tracing

 Collects data for a specific event, such as steps involved

in a system call invocation
 Sometimes using trace listings of activities, recorded for
analysis
 Tools include
• strace – trace system calls invoked by a process
• gdb – source-level debugger
• perf – a collection of Linux performance tools
• tcpdump – collects network packets

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 End of Chapter 2

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