Appendix A: UnixBSD

Module A: The FreeBSD System

„ UNIX History
„ Design Principles
„ Programmer Interface
„ User Interface
„ Process Management
„ Memory Management
„ File System
„ I/O System
„ Interprocess Communication

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 UNIX History

„ First developed in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of the

Research Group at Bell Laboratories; incorporated features of other
operating systems, especially MULTICS
„ The third version was written in C, which was developed at Bell Labs
specifically to support UNIX
„ The most influential of the non-Bell Labs and non-AT&T UNIX
development groups — University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley
Software Distributions - BSD)
z 4BSD UNIX resulted from DARPA funding to develop a standard
UNIX system for government use
z Developed for the VAX, 4.3BSD is one of the most influential
versions, and has been ported to many other platforms
„ Several standardization projects seek to consolidate the variant
flavors of UNIX leading to one programming interface to UNIX

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 History of UNIX Versions

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 Early Advantages of UNIX

„ Written in a high-level language

„ Distributed in source form
„ Provided powerful operating-system primitives on an inexpensive
platform
„ Small size, modular, clean design

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 UNIX Design Principles

„ Designed to be a time-sharing system

„ Has a simple standard user interface (shell) that can be replaced
„ File system with multilevel tree-structured directories
„ Files are supported by the kernel as unstructured sequences of
bytes
„ Supports multiple processes; a process can easily create new
processes
„ High priority given to making system interactive, and providing
facilities for program development

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 Programmer Interface

Like most computer systems, UNIX consists of two separable parts:

„ Kernel: everything below the system-call interface and above

the physical hardware
z Provides file system, CPU scheduling, memory
management, and other OS functions through system calls
„ Systems programs: use the kernel-supported system calls to
provide useful functions, such as compilation and file
manipulation

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 4.4BSD Layer Structure

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 System Calls

„ System calls define the programmer interface to UNIX

„ The set of systems programs commonly available defines the user
interface
„ The programmer and user interface define the context that the
kernel must support
„ Roughly three categories of system calls in UNIX
z File manipulation (same system calls also support device
manipulation)
z Process control
z Information manipulation

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 File Manipulation

„ A file is a sequence of bytes; the kernel does not impose a

structure on files
„ Files are organized in tree-structured directories
„ Directories are files that contain information on how to find other
files
„ Path name: identifies a file by specifying a path through the
directory structure to the file
z Absolute path names start at root of file system
z Relative path names start at the current directory
„ System calls for basic file manipulation: create, open, read,
write, close, unlink, trunc

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 Typical UNIX Directory Structure

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 Process Control

„ A process is a program in execution

„ Processes are identified by their process identifier, an integer
„ Process control system calls
z fork creates a new process
z execve is used after a fork to replace on of the two processes’s
virtual memory space with a new program
z exit terminates a process
z A parent may wait for a child process to terminate; wait
provides the process id of a terminated child so that the parent
can tell which child terminated
z wait3 allows the parent to collect performance statistics about
the child
„ A zombie process results when the parent of a defunct child process
exits before the terminated child

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 Illustration of Process Control Calls

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 Process Control (Cont.)

„ Processes communicate via pipes; queues of bytes between two

processes that are accessed by a file descriptor
„ All user processes are descendants of one original process, init
„ init forks a getty process: initializes terminal line parameters and
passes the user’s login name to login
z login sets the numeric user identifier of the process to that of
the user
z executes a shell which forks subprocesses for user commands

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 Process Control (Cont.)

„ setuid bit sets the effective user identifier of the process to the
user identifier of the owner of the file, and leaves the real user
identifier as it was
„ setuid scheme allows certain processes to have more than
ordinary privileges while still being executable by ordinary users

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 Signals

„ Facility for handling exceptional conditions similar to software

interrupts
„ The interrupt signal, SIGINT, is used to stop a command before
that command completes (usually produced by ^C)
„ Signal use has expanded beyond dealing with exceptional events
z Start and stop subprocesses on demand
z SIGWINCH informs a process that the window in which output
is being displayed has changed size
z Deliver urgent data from network connections

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 Process Groups

„ Set of related processes that cooperate to accomplish a common

task
„ Only one process group may use a terminal device for I/O at any
time
z The foreground job has the attention of the user on the terminal
z Background jobs – nonattached jobs that perform their function
without user interaction
„ Access to the terminal is controlled by process group signals

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 Process Groups (Cont.)

„ Each job inherits a controlling terminal from its parent

z If the process group of the controlling terminal matches the
group of a process, that process is in the foreground
z SIGTTIN or SIGTTOU freezes a background process that
attempts to perform I/O; if the user foregrounds that process,
SIGCONT indicates that the process can now perform I/O
z SIGSTOP freezes a foreground process

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 Information Manipulation

„ System calls to set and return an interval timer:

getitmer/setitmer
„ Calls to set and return the current time:
gettimeofday/settimeofday
„ Processes can ask for
z their process identifier: getpid
z their group identifier: getgid
z the name of the machine on which they are executing:
gethostname

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 Library Routines

„ The system-call interface to UNIX is supported and augmented by

a large collection of library routines

„ Header files provide the definition of complex data structures used

in system calls

„ Additional library support is provided for mathematical functions,

network access, data conversion, etc

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 User Interface

„ Programmers and users mainly deal with already existing systems

programs: the needed system calls are embedded within the
program and do not need to be obvious to the user
„ The most common systems programs are file or directory oriented
z Directory: mkdir, rmdir, cd, pwd
z File: ls, cp, mv, rm
„ Other programs relate to editors (e.g., emacs, vi) text formatters
(e.g., troff, TEX), and other activities

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 Shells and Commands

„ Shell – the user process which executes programs (also called

command interpreter)
„ Called a shell, because it surrounds the kernel
„ The shell indicates its readiness to accept another command by
typing a prompt, and the user types a command on a single line
„ A typical command is an executable binary object file
„ The shell travels through the search path to find the command file,
which is then loaded and executed
„ The directories /bin and /usr/bin are almost always in the
search path

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 Shells and Commands (Cont.)

„ Typical search path on a BSD system:

( ./home/prof/avi/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/ucb/bin /usr/bin )

„ The shell usually suspends its own execution until the command
completes

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 Standard I/O

„ Most processes expect three file descriptors to be open when they

start:
z standard input – program can read what the user types
z standard output – program can send output to user’s screen
z standard error – error output
„ Most programs can also accept a file (rather than a terminal) for
standard input and standard output
„ The common shells have a simple syntax for changing what files
are open for the standard I/O streams of a process — I/O
redirection

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 Standard I/O Redirection

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 Pipelines, Filters, and Shell Scripts

„ Can coalesce individual commands via a vertical bar that tells the
shell to pass the previous command’s output as input to the
following command

% ls | pr | lpr
„ Filter – a command such as pr that passes its standard input to its
standard output, performing some processing on it
„ Writing a new shell with a different syntax and semantics would
change the user view, but not change the kernel or programmer
interface
„ X Window System is a widely accepted iconic interface for UNIX

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 Process Management

„ Representation of processes is a major design problem for

operating system
„ UNIX is distinct from other systems in that multiple processes can
be created and manipulated with ease
„ These processes are represented in UNIX by various control
blocks
z Control blocks associated with a process are stored in the
kernel
z Information in these control blocks is used by the kernel for
process control and CPU scheduling

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 Process Control Blocks

„ The most basic data structure associated with processes is the

process structure
z unique process identifier
z scheduling information (e.g., priority)
z pointers to other control blocks
„ The virtual address space of a user process is divided into text
(program code), data, and stack segments
„ Every process with sharable text has a pointer form its process
structure to a text structure
z always resident in main memory
z records how many processes are using the text segment
z records were the page table for the text segment can be
found on disk when it is swapped

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 System Data Segment

„ Most ordinary work is done in user mode; system calls are

performed in system mode
„ The system and user phases of a process never execute
simultaneously
„ a kernel stack (rather than the user stack) is used for a process
executing in system mode
„ The kernel stack and the user structure together compose the
system data segment for the process

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 Finding parts of a process using process structure

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 Allocating a New Process Structure

„ fork allocates a new process structure for the child process, and
copies the user structure
z new page table is constructed
z new main memory is allocated for the data and stack segments
of the child process
z copying the user structure preserves open file descriptors, user
and group identifiers, signal handling, etc

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 Allocating a New Process Structure (Cont.)

„ vfork does not copy the data and stack to t he new process; the
new process simply shares the page table of the old one
z new user structure and a new process structure are still created
z commonly used by a shell to execute a command and to wait
for its completion
„ A parent process uses vfork to produce a child process; the child
uses execve to change its virtual address space, so there is no
need for a copy of the parent
„ Using vfork with a large parent process saves CPU time, but can
be dangerous since any memory change occurs in both processes
until execve occurs
„ execve creates no new process or user structure; rather the text
and data of the process are replaced

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 CPU Scheduling

„ Every process has a scheduling priority associated with it; larger

numbers indicate lower priority
„ Negative feedback in CPU scheduling makes it difficult for a single
process to take all the CPU time
„ Process aging is employed to prevent starvation
„ When a process chooses to relinquish the CPU, it goes to sleep on
an event
„ When that event occurs, the system process that knows about it
calls wakeup with the address corresponding to the event, and all
processes that had done a sleep on the same address are put in
the ready queue to be run

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 Memory Management

„ The initial memory management schemes were constrained in size

by the relatively small memory resources of the PDP machines on
which UNIX was developed
„ Pre 3BSD system use swapping exclusively to handle memory
contention among processes: If there is too much contention,
processes are swapped out until enough memory is available
„ Allocation of both main memory and swap space is done first-fit

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 Memory Management (Cont.)

„ Sharable text segments do not need to be swapped; results in less

swap traffic and reduces the amount of main memory required for
multiple processes using the same text segment
„ The scheduler process (or swapper) decides which processes to
swap in or out, considering such factors as time idle, time in or out
of main memory, size, etc

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 Paging

„ Berkeley UNIX systems depend primarily on paging for memory-

contention management, and depend only secondarily on swapping
„ Demand paging – When a process needs a page and the page is
not there, a page fault tot he kernel occurs, a frame of main
memory is allocated, and the proper disk page is read into the
frame
„ A pagedaemon process uses a modified second-chance page-
replacement algorithm to keep enough free frames to support the
executing processes
„ If the scheduler decides that the paging system is overloaded,
processes will be swapped out whole until the overload is relieved

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 File System

„ The UNIX file system supports two main objects: files and
directories

„ Directories are just files with a special format, so the representation

of a file is the basic UNIX concept

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 Blocks and Fragments

„ Most of the file system is taken up by data blocks

„ 4.2BSD uses two block sized for files which have no indirect
blocks:
z All the blocks of a file are of a large block size (such as 8K),
except the last
z The last block is an appropriate multiple of a smaller fragment
size (i.e., 1024) to fill out the file
z Thus, a file of size 18,000 bytes would have two 8K blocks and
one 2K fragment (which would not be filled completely)

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 Blocks and Fragments (Cont.)

„ The block and fragment sizes are set during file-system creation
according to the intended use of the file system:
z If many small files are expected, the fragment size should be
small
z If repeated transfers of large files are expected, the basic block
size should be large
„ The maximum block-to-fragment ratio is 8 : 1; the minimum block
size is 4K (typical choices are 4096 : 512 and 8192 : 1024)

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 Inodes

„ A file is represented by an inode — a record that stores

information about a specific file on the disk
„ The inode also contains 15 pointer to the disk blocks containing the
file’s data contents
z First 12 point to direct blocks
z Next three point to indirect blocks
 First indirect block pointer is the address of a single
indirect block — an index block containing the addresses
of blocks that do contain data
 Second is a double-indirect-block pointer, the address of
a block that contains the addresses of blocks that contain
pointer to the actual data blocks.
A triple indirect pointer is not needed; files with as many
as 232 bytes will use only double indirection

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 Directories

„ The inode type field distinguishes between plain files and

directories
„ Directory entries are of variable length; each entry contains first the
length of the entry, then the file name and the inode number
„ The user refers to a file by a path name,whereas the file system
uses the inode as its definition of a file
z The kernel has to map the supplied user path name to an inode
z Directories are used for this mapping

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 Directories (Cont.)

„ First determine the starting directory:

z If the first character is “/”, the starting directory is the root
directory
z For any other starting character, the starting directory is the
current directory
„ The search process continues until the end of the path name is
reached and the desired inode is returned
„ Once the inode is found, a file structure is allocated to point to the
inode
„ 4.3BSD improved file system performance by adding a directory
name cache to hold recent directory-to-inode translations

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 Mapping of a File Descriptor to an Inode

„ System calls that refer to open files indicate the file is passing a file
descriptor as an argument
„ The file descriptor is used by the kernel to index a table of open
files for the current process
„ Each entry of the table contains a pointer to a file structure
„ This file structure in turn points to the inode
„ Since the open file table has a fixed length which is only setable at
boot time, there is a fixed limit on the number of concurrently open
files in a system

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 File-System Control Blocks

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 Disk Structures

„ The one file system that a user ordinarily sees may actually consist
of several physical file systems, each on a different device
„ Partitioning a physical device into multiple file systems has several
benefits
z Different file systems can support different uses
z Reliability is improved
z Can improve efficiency by varying file-system parameters
z Prevents one program form using all available space for a large
file
z Speeds up searches on backup tapes and restoring partitions
from tape

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 Disk Structures (Cont.)

„ The root file system is always available on a drive

„ Other file systems may be mounted — i.e., integrated into the

directory hierarchy of the root file system

„ The following figure illustrates how a directory structure is

partitioned into file systems, which are mapped onto logical
devices, which are partitions of physical devices

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 Mapping File System to Physical Devices

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 Implementations

„ The user interface to the file system is simple and well defined,
allowing the implementation of the file system itself to be changed
without significant effect on the user
„ For Version 7, the size of inodes doubled, the maximum file and file
system sized increased, and the details of free-list handling and
superblock information changed
„ In 4.0BSD, the size of blocks used in the file system was increased
form 512 bytes to 1024 bytes — increased internal fragmentation, but
doubled throughput
„ 4.2BSD added the Berkeley Fast File System, which increased speed,
and included new features
z New directory system calls
z truncate calls
z Fast File System found in most implementations of UNIX

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 Layout and Allocation Policy

„ The kernel uses a <logical device number, inode number> pair to

identify a file
z The logical device number defines the file system involved
z The inodes in the file system are numbered in sequence
„ 4.3BSD introduced the cylinder group — allows localization of the
blocks in a file
z Each cylinder group occupies one or more consecutive
cylinders of the disk, so that disk accesses within the cylinder
group require minimal disk head movement
z Every cylinder group has a superblock, a cylinder block, an
array of inodes, and some data blocks

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 4.3BSD Cylinder Group

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 I/O System

„ The I/O system hides the peculiarities of I/O devices from the bulk
of the kernel

„ Consists of a buffer caching system, general device driver code,

and drivers for specific hardware devices

„ Only the device driver knows the peculiarities of a specific device

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 4.3 BSD Kernel I/O Structure

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 Block Buffer Cache

„ Consist of buffer headers, each of which can point to a piece of

physical memory, as well as to a device number and a block
number on the device
„ The buffer headers for blocks not currently in use are kept in
several linked lists:
z Buffers recently used, linked in LRU order (LRU list)
z Buffers not recently used, or without valid contents (AGE list)
z EMPTY buffers with no associated physical memory
„ When a block is wanted from a device, the cache is searched
„ If the block is found it is used, and no I/O transfer is necessary
„ If it is not found, a buffer is chosen from the AGE list, or the LRU
list if AGE is empty

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 Block Buffer Cache (Cont.)

„ Buffer cache size effects system performance; if it is large enough,

the percentage of cache hits can be high and the number of actual
I/O transfers low
„ Data written to a disk file are buffered in the cache, and the disk
driver sorts its output queue according to disk address — these
actions allow the disk driver to minimize disk head seeks and to
write data at times optimized for disk rotation

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 Raw Device Interfaces

„ Almost every block device has a character interface, or raw device

interface — unlike the block interface, it bypasses the block buffer
cache
„ Each disk driver maintains a queue of pending transfers
„ Each record in the queue specifies:
z whether it is a read or a write
z a main memory address for the transfer
z a device address for the transfer
z a transfer size
„ It is simple to map the information from a block buffer to what is
required for this queue

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 C-Lists

„ Terminal drivers use a character buffering system which involves

keeping small blocks of characters in linked lists
„ A write system call to a terminal enqueues characters on a list for
the device. An initial transfer is started, and interrupts cause
dequeueing of characters and further transfers
„ Input is similarly interrupt driven
„ It is also possible to have the device driver bypass the canonical
queue and return characters directly form the raw queue — raw
mode (used by full-screen editors and other programs that need to
react to every keystroke)

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 Interprocess Communication

„ The pipe is the IPC mechanism most characteristic of UNIX

z Permits a reliable unidirectional byte stream between two
processes
z A benefit of pipes small size is that pipe data are seldom
written to disk; they usually are kept in memory by the normal
block buffer cache
„ In 4.3BSD, pipes are implemented as a special case of the socket
mechanism which provides a general interface not only to facilities
such as pipes, which are local to one machine, but also to
networking facilities
„ The socket mechanism can be used by unrelated processes

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 Sockets

„ A socket is an endpont of communication

„ An in-use socket it usually bound with an address; the nature of the
address depends on the communication domain of the socket
„ A characteristic property of a domain is that processes
communication in the same domain use the same address format
„ A single socket can communicate in only one domain — the three
domains currently implemented in 4.3BSD are:
z the UNIX domain (AF_UNIX)
z the Internet domain (AF_INET)
z the XEROX Network Service (NS) domain (AF_NS)

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 Socket Types

„ Stream sockets provide reliable, duplex, sequenced data streams.

Supported in Internet domain by the TCP protocol. In UNIX domain,
pipes are implemented as a pair of communicating stream sockets
„ Sequenced packet sockets provide similar data streams, except that
record boundaries are provided
z Used in XEROX AF_NS protocol
„ Datagram sockets transfer messages of variable size in either
direction. Supported in Internet domain by UDP protocol
„ Reliably delivered message sockets transfer messages that are
guaranteed to arrive (Currently unsupported)
„ Raw sockets allow direct access by processes to the protocols that
support the other socket types; e.g., in the Internet domain, it is
possible to reach TCP, IP beneath that, or a deeper Ethernet protocol
z Useful for developing new protocols

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 Socket System Calls

„ The socket call creates a socket; takes as arguments specifications

of the communication domain, socket type, and protocol to be used
and returns a small integer called a socket descriptor
„ A name is bound to a socket by the bind system call
„ The connect system call is used to initiate a connection
„ A server process uses socket to create a socket and bind to bind
the well-known address of its service to that socket
z Uses listen to tell the kernel that it is ready to accept
connections from clients
z Uses accept to accept individual connections
z Uses fork to produce a new process after the accept to service
the client while the original server process continues to listen for
more connections

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 Socket System Calls (Cont.)

„ The simplest way to terminate a connection and to destroy the

associated socket is to use the close system call on its socket
descriptor
„ The select system call can be used to multiplex data transfers on
several file descriptors and /or socket descriptors

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 Network Support

„ Networking support is one of the most important features in

4.3BSD
„ The socket concept provides the programming mechanism to
access other processes, even across a network
„ Sockets provide an interface to several sets of protocols
„ Almost all current UNIX systems support UUCP
„ 4.3BSD supports the DARPA Internet protocols UDP, TCP, IP, and
ICMP on a wide range of Ethernet, token-ring, and ARPANET
interfaces
„ The 4.3BSD networking implementation, and to a certain extent the
socket facility, is more oriented toward the ARPANET Reference
Model (ARM)

Operating System Concepts – 7th Edition, Feb 11, 2005 A.62 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005
 Network Reference models and Layering

Operating System Concepts – 7th Edition, Feb 11, 2005 A.63 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005
End of Appendix A