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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 51-52 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 51
20
INTRODUCTION
CHAP. 1
of the town (although not nearly as dominant as Symbian had been), but it did not
take very long for Android, a Linux-based operating system released by Google in
2008, to overtake all its rivals.
For phone manufacturers, Android had the advantage that it was open source
and available under a permissive license. As a result, they could tinker with it and
adapt it to their own hardware with ease. Also, it has a huge community of devel-
opers writing apps, mostly in the familiar Java programming language. Even so,
the past years have shown that the dominance may not last, and Android’s competi-
tors are eager to claw back some of its market share.
We will look at Android in
detail in Sec. 10.8.
1.3 COMPUTER HARDWARE REVIEW
An operating system is intimately tied to the hardware of the computer it runs
on. It extends the computer’s instruction set and manages its resources.
To work,
it must know a great deal about the hardware, at least about how the hardware ap-
pears to the programmer. For this reason, let us briefly review computer hardware
as found in modern personal computers. After that, we can start getting into the de-
tails of what operating systems do and how they work.
Conceptually, a simple personal computer can be abstracted to a model resem-
bling that of Fig. 1-6. The CPU, memory, and I/O devices are all connected by a
system bus and communicate with one another over it. Modern personal computers
have a more complicated structure, involving multiple buses, which we will look at
later. For the time being, this model will be sufficient. In the following sections,
we will briefly review these components and examine some of the hardware issues
that are of concern to operating system designers. Needless to say, this will be a
very compact summary.
Many books have been written on the subject of computer
hardware and computer organization. Two well-known ones are by Tanenbaum
and Austin (2012) and Patterson and Hennessy (2013).
Monitor
Keyboard
USB printer
Hard
disk drive
Hard
disk
controller
USB
controller
Keyboard
controller
Video
controller
Memory
CPU
Bus
MMU
Figure 1-6.
Some of the components of a simple personal computer.
Page 52
SEC. 1.3
COMPUTER HARDWARE REVIEW
21
1.3.1 Processors
The ‘‘brain’’ of the computer is the CPU.
It fetches instructions from memory
and executes them. The basic cycle of every CPU is to fetch the first instruction
from memory, decode it to determine its type and operands, execute it, and then
fetch, decode, and execute subsequent instructions.
The cycle is repeated until the
program finishes. In this way, programs are carried out.
Each CPU has a specific set of instructions that it can execute. Thus an x86
processor cannot execute ARM programs and an ARM processor cannot execute
x86 programs. Because accessing memory to get an instruction or data word takes
much longer than executing an instruction, all CPUs contain some registers inside
to hold key variables and temporary results. Thus the instruction set generally con-
tains instructions to load a word from memory into a register, and store a word
from a register into memory. Other instructions combine two operands from regis-
ters, memory, or both into a result, such as adding two words and storing the result
in a register or in memory.
In addition to the general registers used to hold variables and temporary re-
sults, most computers have several special registers that are visible to the pro-
grammer. One of these is the
program counter
, which contains the memory ad-
dress of the next instruction to be fetched. After that instruction has been fetched,
the program counter is updated to point to its successor.
Another register is the
stack pointer
, which points to the top of the current
stack in memory. The stack contains one frame for each procedure that has been
entered but not yet exited. A procedure’s stack frame holds those input parameters,
local variables, and temporary variables that are not kept in registers.
Yet another register is the
PSW
(
Program Status Word
). This register con-
tains the condition code bits, which are set by comparison instructions, the CPU
priority, the mode (user or kernel), and various other control bits. User programs
may normally read the entire PSW but typically may write only some of its fields.
The PSW plays an important role in system calls and I/O.
The operating system must be fully aware of all the registers. When time mul-
tiplexing the CPU, the operating system will often stop the running program to
(re)start another one. Every time it stops a running program, the operating system
must save all the registers so they can be restored when the program runs later.
To improve performance, CPU designers have long abandoned the simple
model of fetching, decoding, and executing one instruction at a time. Many modern
CPUs have facilities for executing more than one instruction at the same time. For
example, a CPU might have separate fetch, decode, and execute units, so that while
it is executing instruction
n
, it could also be decoding instruction
n
+
1 and fetch-
ing instruction
n
+
2. Such an organization is called a
pipeline
and is illustrated in
Fig. 1-7(a) for a pipeline with three stages. Longer pipelines are common.
In most
pipeline designs, once an instruction has been fetched into the pipeline, it must be
executed, even if the preceding instruction was a conditional branch that was taken.
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