COT 5611 Operating Systems Design Principles Spring 2012

1. COT 5611 Operating SystemsDesign Principles Spring 2012 Dan C. Marinescu Office: HEC 304 Office hours: M-Wd 5:00-6:00 PM

2. Lecture 21 – WednesdayMarch 28, 2012 • Reading assignment: • Chapter 9 from the on-line text • Last time – • Conditions for thread coordination – Safety, Liveness, Bounded-Wait, Fairness • Critical sections – a solution to critical section problem • Deadlocks • Signals • Semaphores • Monitors • Thread coordination with a bounded buffer. • WAIT • NOTIFY • AWAIT Lecture 21

3. Today • ADVANCE • SEQUENCE • TICKET • Events • Coordination with events • Virtual memory and multi-level memory management • Atomic actions • All-or nothing and Before-or-after atomicity • Applications of atomicity Lecture 21

4. Simultaneous conditions for deadlock • Mutual exclusion: only one process at a time can use a resource. • Hold and wait: a process holding at least one resource is waiting to acquire additional resources held by other processes. • No preemption: a resource can be released only voluntarily by the process holding it (presumably after that process has finished). • Circular wait: there exists a set {P0, P1, …, P0} of waiting processes such that P0 is waiting for a resource that is held by P1, P1 is waiting for a resource that is held by P2, …, Pn–1 is waiting for a resource that is held by Pn, and P0 is waiting for a resource that is held by P0. Lecture 21

5. Wait for graphs Processes are represented as nodes, and an edge from thread Tito thread Tj  implies that Tj  is holding a resource that Ti  needs and thus  is waiting for Tj  to release its lock on that resource. A deadlock exists if the graph contains any cycles. Lecture 21

6. Semaphore • Abstract data structure introduced by Dijkstra to reduce complexity of threads coordination; has two components • C  count giving the status of the contention for the resource guarded by s • L  list of threads waiting for the semaphore s • Two operations • P - wait(): Decrements the value of a semaphore variable by 1. If the value becomes negative, the process executing wait() is blocked, i.e., added to the semaphore's queue. • V- signal(): Increments the value of semaphore variable by 1. After the increment, if the value is negative, it transfers a blocked process from the semaphore's queue to the ready queue. Lecture 21

7. Counting and binary semaphores Counting semaphore – used for pools of resources (multiple units), e.g., cores.  If a process performs a P operation on a semaphore that has the value zero, the process is added to the semaphore's queue. When another process increments the semaphore by performing a V operation, and there are processes on the queue, one of them is removed from the queue and resumes execution. When processes have different priorities the queue may be ordered by priority, so that the highest priority process is taken from the queue first. Binary semaphore: C is either 0 or 1. Lecture 21

8. The wait and signal operations P (s) (wait) { If s.C > 0 then s.C − −; else join s.L; } V (s) (signal) { If s.L is empty then s.C + +; else release a process from s.L; } Lecture 21

9. Monitors • Semaphores can be used incorrectly • multiple threads may be allowed to enter the critical section guarded by the semaphore • may cause deadlocks • Threads may access the shared data directly without checking the semaphore. • Solution  encapsulate shared data with access methods to operate on them. • Monitors  an abstract data type that allows access to shared data with specific methods that guarantee mutual exclusion Lecture 21

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11. Asynchronous events and signals • Signals, or software interrupts, were originally introduced in Unix to notify a process about the occurrence of a particular event in the system. • Signals are analogous to hardware I/O interrupts: • When a signal arrives, control will abruptly switch to the signal handler. • When the handler is finished and returns, control goes back to where it came from • After receiving a signal, the receiver reacts to it in a well-defined manner. That is, a process can tell the system (OS) what they want to do when signal arrives: • Ignore it. • Catch it and deliver it. In this case, it must specify (register) the signal handling procedure. This procedure resides in the user space. The kernel will make a call to this procedure during the signal handling and control returns to kernel after it is done. • Kill the process (default for most signals). • Examples: Event - child exit, signal - to parent. Control signal from keyboard. Lecture 21

12. Signals state and implementation • A signal has the following states: • Signal send - A process can send signal to one of its group member process (parent, sibling, children, and further descendants). • Signal delivered - Signal bit is set. • Pending signal - delivered but not yet received (action has not been taken). • Signal lost - either ignored or overwritten. • Implementation: Each process has a kernel space (created by default) called signal descriptor having bits for each signal. Setting a bit is delivering the signal, and resetting the bit is to indicate that the signal is received. A signal could be blocked/ignored. This requires an additional bit for each signal. Most signals are system controlled signals. Lecture 21

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14. NOTIFY could be sent before the WAIT and this causes problems The NOTIFY should always be sent after the WAIT. If the sender and the receiver run on two different processor there could be a race condition for the notempty event. Tension between modularity and locks Several possible solutions: AWAIT/ADVANCE, semaphores, etc Lecture 21

15. AWAIT - ADVANCE solution • A new state, WAITING and two before-or-after actions that take a RUNNING thread into the WAITING state and back to RUNNABLE state. • eventcount variables with an integer value shared between threads and the thread manager; they are like events but have a value. • A thread in the WAITING state waits for a particular value of the eventcount • AWAIT(eventcount,value) • If eventcount >value  the control is returned to the thread calling AWAIT and this thread will continue execution • If eventcount ≤value  the state of the thread calling AWAIT is changed to WAITING and the thread is suspended. • ADVANCE(eventcount) • increments the eventcount by one then • searches the thread_tablefor threads waiting for this eventcount • if it finds a thread and the eventcount exceeds the value the thread is waiting for then the state of the thread is changed to RUNNABLE Lecture 21

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17. Implementation of AWAIT and ADVANCE Lecture 21

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19. Solution for a single sender and single receiver Lecture 21

20. Supporting multiple senders: the sequencer Sequencer shared variable supporting thread sequence coordination -it allows threads to be ordered and is manipulated using two before-or-after actions. TICKET(sequencer)  returns a negative value which increases by one at each call. Two concurrent threads calling TICKET on the same sequencer will receive different values based upon the timing of the call, the one calling first will receive a smaller value. READ(sequencer)  returns the current value of the sequencer Lecture 21

21. Multiple sender solution; only the SEND must be modified Lecture 21

22. Virtual memory and multi-level memory management • Recall that there is tension between pipelining and VM management the page targeted by a load or store instruction may not be in the real memory and we experience a page fault. • Multi-level memory management  brings a page from the secondary device (e.g., disk) in a frame in main memory. • Virtual memory management  performs dynamic address translation, maps virtual to physical addresses. • Modular design: separate • Multi-level memory management • Virtual memory management Lecture 21

23. Name resolution in multi-level memories • We consider pairs of layers: • Upper level of the pair  primary • Lower level of the pair  secondary • The top level managed by the application which generates LOAD and STORE instructions to/from CPU registers from/to named memory locations • The processor issues READs/WRITEs to named memory locations. The name goes to the primary memory device located on the same chip as the processor which searches the name space of the on-chip cache (L1 cache), the primary device with the L2 cache as secondary device. • If the name is not found in L1 cache name space the Multi-Level Memory Manager (MLMM) looks at the L2 cache (off-chip cache) which becomes the primary with the main memory as secondary. • If the name is not found in the L2 cache name space the MLMM looks at the main memory name space. Now the main memory is the primary device. • If the name is not found in the main memory name space then the Virtual Memory Manager is invoked Lecture 21

24. The modular design • VM attempts to translate the virtual memory address to a physical memory address • If the page is not in main memory VM generates a page-fault exception. • The exception handler uses a SEND to send to an MLMM port the page number • The SEND invokes ADVANCE which wakes up a thread of MLMM • The MMLM invokes AWAIT on behalf of the thread interrupted due to the page fault. • The AWAIT releases the processor to the SCHEDULER thread. Lecture 21

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26. Atomicity • Atomicity  ability to carry out an action involving multiple steps as an indivisible action; hide the structure of the action from an external observer. • All-or-nothing atomicity (AONA) • To an external observer (e.g., the invoker) an atomic action appears as if it either completes or it has never taken place. • Before-or-after atomicity (BOAA) • Allows several actions operating on the same resources (e.g., shared data) to act without interfering with one another • To an external observer (e.g., the invoker) the atomic actions appear as if they completed either before or after each other. • Atomicity • simplifies the description of the possible states of the system as it hides the structure of a possible complex atomic action • allows us to treat systematically and using the same strategy two critical problems in system design and implementation (a) recovery from failures and (b) coordination of concurrent activities Lecture 21

27. Atomicity in computer systems • Hardware: interrupt and exception handling (AONA) + register renaming (BOAA) • OS: SVCs (AONA) + non-sharable device (e.g., printer) queues (BOAA) • Applications: layered design (AONA) + process coordination (BOAA) • Database: updating records (AONA) + sharing records (BOAA) • Example: exception handling when one of the following events occur • Hardware faults • External events • Program exception • Fair-share scheduling • Preemptive scheduling when priorities are involved • Process termination to avoid deadlock • User-initiated process termination • Register renaming avoid unnecessary serialization of program operations imposed by the reuse of registers by those operations. High performance CPUs have more physical registers than may be named directly in the instruction set, so they rename registers in hardware to achieve additional parallelism. r1  m(1000) r1  r1+5 m(1000)  r1 r1  m(2000) r1  r1+8 m(2000)  r1 Lecture 21

28. Atomicity in databases and application software • Recovery from system failures and coordination of multiple activities is not possible if actions are not atomic. • Database example: a procedure to transfer from a debit account (A) to a credit account (B) Procedure TRANSFER (debit_account, credit_account, amount) GET (temp, A) temp  temp – amount PUT (temp, A) GET (temp, B) temp  temp + amount PUT (temp, B) What if: (a) the system fails after the first PUT; (b) multiple transactions on the same account take place. • Layered application software example: a calendar program with three layers of interpreters: • Calendar program • JVM • Physical layer Lecture 21

29. All-or-nothing atomicity • The AONA is required to (1) handle interrupts (e.g., a page fault in the middle of a pipelined instruction). Need to retrofit the AONA at the machine language interface if every machine instruction is an AONA then the OS could save as the next instruction the one where the page fault occurs. Additional complications with a user-supplied exception handler. (2) handle supervisor calls (SVCs); an SVC requires a kernel action to change the PC, the mode bit (from user to kernel) and the code to carry out the required function. The SVC should appear as an extension of the hardware. • Design solutions a typewriter driver activated by a user issued SVC, READ. • Implement the “nothing” option  blocking read; when no input is present reissue the READ as the next instruction. This solution allows a user to supply its own exception handler. • Implement the “all” option  non-blocking read; return control to the user program if no input available with a zero length input. Lecture 21

30. Before-or-after atomicity • Two approaches to concurrent action coordination: • Sequence coordination e.g., “action A should occur before B”  strict ordering • BOAA, the effect of A and B is the same whether A occurs before B or B before A  non-strict ordering. • BOAA is more general than sequence coordination. • Example: two transactions operating on account A each performs GET and PUT • Six possible sequences of actions: (G1,P1, G2, P2), (G2,P2,G1,P1), (G1,G2, P1, P2), (G1,G2, P2, P1), (G2,G1, P1,P2), (G2, G1, P2, P1). • Only the first two lead to correct results. • Solution the sequence Ri  Pi should be atomic. • Correctness condition for coordination  if every possible result is guaranteed to be the same as if the actions were applied in one after another in some order. • Before-or-after atomicity guarantees the correctness of coordination  indeed it serializes the actions. • Stronger correctness requirements are sometimes necessary: • External time consistency  e.g., in banking the transaction should be processed in the order they are issued. • Sequential consistency  e.g., instruction reordering should not affect the result Lecture 21

31. Common strategy and side-effects of atomicity • The common strategy for BOAA and AONA  hide the internal structure of a complex action; prevent an external observer to discover the structure and the implementation of the atomic action. • Atomic actions could have “good” (benevolent) side-effects: • An audit log records the cause of a failure and the recovery steps for later analysis • Performance optimization: when adding a record to a file the data management may restructure/reorganize the file to improve the access time Lecture 21