Chapter 12: I/O Systems

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Chapter 12: I/O Systems
 Overview
 I/O Hardware
 Application I/O Interface
 Kernel I/O Subsystem
 Transforming I/O Requests to Hardware Operations
 STREAMS
 Performance

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 Objectives
 Explore the structure of an operating system’s I/O subsystem

 Discuss the principles and complexities of I/O hardware

 Explain the performance aspects of I/O hardware and software

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 Overview
 I/O management is a major component of operating system design and
operation
• Important aspect of computer operation
• I/O devices vary greatly
• Various methods to control them
• Performance management
• New types of devices frequent
 Ports, busses, device controllers connect to various devices
 Device drivers encapsulate device details
• Present uniform device-access interface to I/O subsystem

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 I/O Hardware
 Incredible variety of I/O devices
• Storage
• Transmission
• Human-interface
 Common concepts – signals from I/O devices interface with computer
• Port – connection point for device
• Bus - daisy chain or shared direct access
 PCI bus common in PCs and servers, PCI Express (PCIe)
 expansion bus connects relatively slow devices
 Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) common disk interface
• Controller (host adapter) – electronics that operate port, bus, device
 Sometimes integrated
 Sometimes separate circuit board (host adapter)
 Contains processor, microcode, private memory, bus controller, etc.
– Some talk to per-device controller with bus controller, microcode,
memory, etc.

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 A Typical PC Bus Structure

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 I/O Hardware (Cont.)
 Fibre channel (FC) is complex controller, usually separate
circuit board (host-bus adapter, HBA) plugging into bus
 I/O instructions control devices
 Devices usually have registers where device driver places
commands, addresses, and data to write, or read data from
registers after command execution
• Data-in register, data-out register, status register, control
register
• Typically 1-4 bytes, or FIFO buffer
 Devices have addresses, used by
• Direct I/O instructions
• Memory-mapped I/O
 Device data and command registers mapped to
processor address space
 Especially for large address spaces (graphics)

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 Device I/O Port Locations on PCs (partial)

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 Polling
 For each byte of I/O
1. Read busy bit from status register until 0
2. Host sets read or write bit and if write copies data into data-out
register
3. Host sets command-ready bit
4. Controller sets busy bit, executes transfer
5. Controller clears busy bit, error bit, command-ready bit when
transfer done
 Step 1 is busy-wait cycle to wait for I/O from device
 Reasonable if device is fast
 But inefficient if device slow
 CPU switches to other tasks?
 But if miss a cycle data overwritten / lost

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 Interrupts
 Polling can happen in 3 instruction cycles
• Read status, logical-and to extract status bit, branch if not zero
• How to be more efficient if non-zero infrequently?
 CPU Interrupt-request line triggered by I/O device
• Checked by processor after each instruction
 Interrupt handler receives interrupts
• Maskable to ignore or delay some interrupts
 Interrupt vector to dispatch interrupt to correct handler
• Context switch at start and end
• Based on priority
• Some nonmaskable
• Interrupt chaining if more than one device at same interrupt
number

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 Interrupt-Driven I/O Cycle

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 Interrupts (Cont.)
 Interrupt mechanism also used for exceptions
• Terminate process, crash system due to hardware error
 Page fault executes when memory access error
 System call executes via trap to trigger kernel to execute
request
 Multi-CPU systems can process interrupts concurrently
• If operating system designed to handle it
 Used for time-sensitive processing, frequent, must be fast

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 Latency
 Stressing interrupt management because even single-user systems
manage hundreds or interrupts per second and servers hundreds of
thousands
 For example, a quiet macOS desktop generated 23,000 interrupts
over 10 seconds

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 Intel Pentium Processor Event-Vector Table

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 Direct Memory Access
 Used to avoid programmed I/O (one byte at a time) for large data
movement
 Requires DMA controller
 Bypasses CPU to transfer data directly between I/O device and
memory
 OS writes DMA command block into memory
• Source and destination addresses
• Read or write mode
• Count of bytes
• Writes location of command block to DMA controller
• Bus mastering of DMA controller – grabs bus from CPU
 Cycle stealing from CPU but still much more efficient
• When done, interrupts to signal completion
 Version that is aware of virtual addresses can be even more efficient -
DVMA

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 Six Step Process to Perform DMA Transfer

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 Application I/O Interface
 I/O system calls encapsulate device behaviors in generic classes
 Device-driver layer hides differences among I/O controllers from kernel
 New devices talking already-implemented protocols need no extra work
 Each OS has its own I/O subsystem structures and device driver
frameworks
 Devices vary in many dimensions
• Character-stream or block
• Sequential or random-access
• Synchronous or asynchronous (or both)
• Sharable or dedicated
• Speed of operation
• read-write, read only, or write only

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 A Kernel I/O Structure

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 Characteristics of I/O Devices

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 Characteristics of I/O Devices (Cont.)
 Subtleties of devices handled by device drivers
 Broadly I/O devices can be grouped by the OS into
• Block I/O
• Character I/O (Stream)
• Memory-mapped file access
• Network sockets
 For direct manipulation of I/O device specific characteristics, usually an
escape / back door
• Unix ioctl() call to send arbitrary bits to a device control register and
data to device data register
 UNIX and Linux use tuple of “major” and “minor” device numbers to identify
type and instance of devices (here major 8 and minors 0-4)
% ls –l /dev/sda*

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 Block and Character Devices
 Block devices include disk drives
• Commands include read, write, seek
• Raw I/O, direct I/O, or file-system access
• Memory-mapped file access possible
 File mapped to virtual memory and clusters brought via
demand paging
• DMA
 Character devices include keyboards, mice, serial ports
• Commands include get(), put()
• Libraries layered on top allow line editing

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 Network Devices
 Varying enough from block and character to have own
interface
 Linux, Unix, Windows and many others include socket
interface
• Separates network protocol from network operation
• Includes select() functionality
 Approaches vary widely (pipes, FIFOs, streams, queues,
mailboxes)

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 Clocks and Timers
 Provide current time, elapsed time, timer
 Normal resolution about 1/60 second
 Some systems provide higher-resolution timers
 Programmable interval timer used for timings, periodic
interrupts
 ioctl() (on UNIX) covers odd aspects of I/O such as
clocks and timers

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 Nonblocking and Asynchronous I/O
 Blocking - process suspended until I/O completed
• Easy to use and understand
• Insufficient for some needs
 Nonblocking - I/O call returns as much as available
• User interface, data copy (buffered I/O)
• Implemented via multi-threading
• Returns quickly with count of bytes read or written
• select() to find if data ready then read() or write()
to transfer
 Asynchronous - process runs while I/O executes
• Difficult to use
• I/O subsystem signals process when I/O completed

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 Two I/O Methods

Synchronous Asynchronous

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 Vectored I/O
 Vectored I/O allows one system call to perform multiple I/O
operations
 For example, Unix readve() accepts a vector of multiple
buffers to read into or write from
 This scatter-gather method better than multiple individual I/O
calls
• Decreases context switching and system call overhead
• Some versions provide atomicity
 Avoid for example worry about multiple threads
changing data as reads / writes occurring

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 Kernel I/O Subsystem
 Scheduling
• Some I/O request ordering via per-device queue
• Some OSs try fairness
• Some implement Quality Of Service (i.e. IPQOS)
 Buffering - store data in memory while transferring between devices
• To cope with device speed mismatch
• To cope with device transfer size mismatch
• To maintain “copy semantics”
• Double buffering – two copies of the data
 Kernel and user
 Varying sizes
 Full / being processed and not-full / being used
 Copy-on-write can be used for efficiency in some cases

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 Device-status Table

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 Common PC and Data-center I/O devices and Interface Speeds

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 Kernel I/O Subsystem
 Caching - faster device holding copy of data
• Always just a copy
• Key to performance
• Sometimes combined with buffering
 Spooling - hold output for a device
• If device can serve only one request at a time
• i.e., Printing
 Device reservation - provides exclusive access to a device
• System calls for allocation and de-allocation
• Watch out for deadlock

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 Error Handling

 OS can recover from disk read, device unavailable, transient

write failures
• Retry a read or write, for example
• Some systems more advanced – Solaris FMA, AIX
 Track error frequencies, stop using device with
increasing frequency of retry-able errors
 Most return an error number or code when I/O request fails
 System error logs hold problem reports

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 I/O Protection

 User process may accidentally or purposefully attempt to

disrupt normal operation via illegal I/O instructions
• All I/O instructions defined to be privileged
• I/O must be performed via system calls
 Memory-mapped and I/O port memory locations must
be protected too

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 Use of a System Call to Perform I/O

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 Kernel Data Structures
 Kernel keeps state info for I/O components, including open file
tables, network connections, character device state
 Many, many complex data structures to track buffers, memory
allocation, “dirty” blocks
 Some use object-oriented methods and message passing to
implement I/O
• Windows uses message passing
 Message with I/O information passed from user mode
into kernel
 Message modified as it flows through to device driver
and back to process
 Pros / cons?

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 UNIX I/O Kernel Structure

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 Power Management
 Not strictly domain of I/O, but much is I/O related
 Computers and devices use electricity, generate heat, frequently
require cooling
 OSes can help manage and improve use
• Cloud computing environments move virtual machines
between servers
 Can end up evacuating whole systems and shutting them
down
 Mobile computing has power management as first class OS
aspect

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 Power Management (Cont.)
 For example, Android implements
• Component-level power management
 Understands relationship between components
 Build device tree representing physical device topology
 System bus -> I/O subsystem -> {flash, USB storage}
 Device driver tracks state of device, whether in use
 Unused component – turn it off
 All devices in tree branch unused – turn off branch
• Wake locks – like other locks but prevent sleep of device when lock is held
• Power collapse – put a device into very deep sleep
 Marginal power use
 Only awake enough to respond to external stimuli (button press,
incoming call)
 Modern systems use advanced configuration and power interface
(ACPI) firmware providing code that runs as routines called by kernel for
device discovery, management, error and power management

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 Kernel I/O Subsystem Summary
 In summary, the I/O subsystem coordinates an extensive collection of
services that are available to applications and to other parts of the
kernel
• Management of the name space for files and devices
• Access control to files and devices
• Operation control (for example, a modem cannot seek())
• File-system space allocation
• Device allocation
• Buffering, caching, and spooling
• I/O scheduling
• Device-status monitoring, error handling, and failure recovery
• Device-driver configuration and initialization
• Power management of I/O devices
 The upper levels of the I/O subsystem access devices via the uniform
interface provided by the device drivers

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 Transforming I/O Requests to Hardware Operations

 Consider reading a file from disk for a process:

• Determine device holding file
• Translate name to device representation
• Physically read data from disk into buffer
• Make data available to requesting process
• Return control to process

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 Life Cycle of An I/O Request

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 STREAMS
 STREAM – a full-duplex communication channel between a
user-level process and a device in Unix System V and beyond
 A STREAM consists of:
• STREAM head interfaces with the user process
• driver end interfaces with the device
• zero or more STREAM modules between them
 Each module contains a read queue and a write queue

 Message passing is used to communicate between queues

• Flow control option to indicate available or busy
 Asynchronous internally, synchronous where user process
communicates with stream head

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 The STREAMS Structure

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 Performance

 I/O a major factor in system performance:

• Demands CPU to execute device driver, kernel I/O
code
• Context switches due to interrupts
• Data copying
• Network traffic especially stressful

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 Intercomputer Communications

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 Improving Performance
 Reduce number of context switches
 Reduce data copying
 Reduce interrupts by using large transfers, smart controllers,
polling
 Use DMA
 Use smarter hardware devices
 Balance CPU, memory, bus, and I/O performance for highest
throughput
 Move user-mode processes / daemons to kernel threads

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 Device-Functionality Progression

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 I/O Performance of Storage (and Network Latency)

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 End of Chapter 12

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