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Modern Operating Systems by Herbert Bos and Andrew S. Tanenb...
Modern_Operating_Systems_by_Herbert_Bos_and_Andrew_S._Tanenbaum_4th_Ed.pdf
Showing 58-59 out of 1137
Modern Operating Systems by Herbert Bos and Andrew...
Modern_Operating_Systems_by_Herbert_Bos_and_Andrew_S._Tanenbaum_4th_Ed.pdf-M ODERN O PERATING S YSTEMS
Modern Operating Systems by Herbert...
Modern_Operating_Systems_by_Herbert_Bos_and_Andrew_S._Tanenbaum_4th_Ed.pdf-M ODERN O PERATING S YSTEMS
Page 58
SEC. 1.3
COMPUTER HARDWARE REVIEW
27
Flash memory is also commonly used as the storage medium in portable elec-
tronic devices. It serves as film in digital cameras and as the disk in portable music
players, to name just two uses. Flash memory is intermediate in speed between
RAM and disk.
Also, unlike disk memory, if it is erased too many times, it wears
out.
Yet another kind of memory is CMOS, which is volatile. Many computers use
CMOS memory to hold the current time and date.
The CMOS memory and the
clock circuit that increments the time in it are powered by a small battery, so the
time is correctly updated, even when the computer is unplugged. The CMOS mem-
ory can also hold the configuration parameters, such as which disk to boot from.
CMOS is used because it draws so little power that the original factory-installed
battery often lasts for several years. However, when it begins to fail, the computer
can appear to have Alzheimer’s disease, forgetting things that it has known for
years, like which hard disk to boot from.
1.3.3 Disks
Next in the hierarchy is magnetic disk (hard disk).
Disk storage is two orders
of magnitude cheaper than RAM per bit and often two orders of magnitude larger
as well. The only problem is that the time to randomly access data on it is close to
three orders of magnitude slower.
The reason is that a disk is a mechanical device,
as shown in Fig. 1-10.
Surface 2
Surface 1
Surface 0
Read/write head (1 per surface)
Direction of arm motion
Surface 3
Surface 5
Surface 4
Surface 7
Surface 6
Figure 1-10.
Structure of a disk drive.
A disk consists of one or more metal platters that rotate at 5400, 7200, 10,800
RPM or more.
A mechanical arm pivots over the platters from the corner, similar
to the pickup arm on an old 33-RPM phonograph for playing vinyl records.
Page 59
28
INTRODUCTION
CHAP. 1
Information is written onto the disk in a series of concentric circles.
At any given
arm position, each of the heads can read an annular region called a
track
. Toget-
her, all the tracks for a given arm position form a
cylinder
.
Each track is divided into some number of sectors, typically 512 bytes per sec-
tor.
On modern disks, the outer cylinders contain more sectors than the inner ones.
Moving the arm from one cylinder to the next takes about 1 msec. Moving it to a
random cylinder typically takes 5 to 10 msec, depending on the drive. Once the
arm is on the correct track, the drive must wait for the needed sector to rotate under
the head, an additional delay of 5 msec to 10 msec, depending on the drive’s RPM.
Once the sector is under the head, reading or writing occurs at a rate of 50 MB/sec
on low-end disks to 160 MB/sec on faster ones.
Sometimes you will hear people talk about disks that are really not disks at all,
like
SSDs
,(
Solid State Disks
). SSDs do not have moving parts, do not contain
platters in the shape of disks, and store data in (Flash) memory.
The only ways in
which they resemble disks is that they also store a lot of data which is not lost
when the power is off.
Many computers support a scheme known as
virtual memory
, which we will
discuss at some length in Chap. 3.
This scheme makes it possible to run programs
larger than physical memory by placing them on the disk and using main memory
as a kind of cache for the most heavily executed parts. This scheme requires re-
mapping memory addresses on the fly to convert the address the program gener-
ated to the physical address in RAM where the word is located. This mapping is
done by a part of the CPU called the
MMU
(
Memory Management Unit
), as
shown in Fig. 1-6.
The presence of caching and the MMU can have a major impact on per-
formance. In a multiprogramming system, when switching from one program to
another, sometimes called a
context switch
, it may be necessary to flush all modi-
fied blocks from the cache and change the mapping registers in the MMU.
Both of
these are expensive operations, and programmers try hard to avoid them.
We will
see some of the implications of their tactics later.
1.3.4 I/O Devices
The CPU and memory are not the only resources that the operating system
must manage.
I/O devices also interact heavily with the operating system.
As we
saw in Fig. 1-6, I/O devices generally consist of two parts: a controller and the de-
vice itself. The controller is a chip or a set of chips that physically controls the de-
vice. It accepts commands from the operating system, for example, to read data
from the device, and carries them out.
In many cases, the actual control of the device is complicated and detailed, so
it is the job of the controller to present a simpler (but still very complex) interface
to the operating system.
For example, a disk controller might accept a command to
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