ARASU ENGINEERING

COLLEGE
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING

CS3451 – INTRODUCTION TO
OPERATING SYSTEMS
II YEAR / IV SEMESTER
Anna University Syllabus, 2021
Regulation
Prepared by
Mrs. V. Revathy
Assistant
Professor/ CSE
Multiprocess Architecture: Chrome Browser
 Many web browsers ran as single process (some still do)
 If one web site causes trouble, entire browser can hang or
crash
 Google Chrome Browser is multiprocess with 3 different types
of processes:
 Browser process manages user interface, disk and network
I/O
 Renderer process renders web pages, deals with HTML,
Javascript. A new renderer created for each website
opened
 Runs in sandbox restricting disk and network I/O,
minimizing effect of security exploits
 Plug-in process for each type of plug-in
CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC
 Interprocess Communication
 Processes within a system may be independent or cooperating
 Cooperating process can affect or be affected by other
processes,
including sharing data
 Reasons for cooperating processes:
 Information sharing
 Computation speedup
 Modularity
 Convenience
 Cooperating processes need interprocess communication (IPC)
 Two models of IPC
 Shared memory
 Message passing
CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC
 Communications Models
(a) Message passing. (b) shared
memory.

CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC

 Cooperating
Processes
Independent process cannot affect or be
affected by the execution of another process
Cooperating process can affect or be affected by
the execution of another process
Advantages of process cooperation
 Information sharing
Computation speed-up
Modularity
 Convenience

CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC

 Producer-Consumer Problem
 Paradigm for Bounded-Buffer –
cooperating
processes, producer Shared- Memory
process produces Solution
informatio that  Shared data
consumed
n by a is #define BUFFER_SIZE 10
consumer typedef struct {
process ...
 unbounded-buffer
places no } item;
limit practical
the bufferthe size of
on item buffer[BUFFER_SIZE];
 bounded-buffer int in = 0;
assumes that there is int out = 0;
a fixed buffer size  Solution is correct, but can
only use
CS3451-IOS/
BUFFER_SIZE-1 elements
V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC
Bounded Buffer:Producer & Consumer

item next_produced; item

while (true) { next_consumed;
/ * produce an item in while (true) {
next produced * / while (in == out)
while (((in + 1) % ; / * do nothing * /
BUFFER_SIZE) == next_consumed =
out) buffer[out];
; / * do nothing * / out = (out + 1) %
buffer[in] = next_produced; BUFFER_SIZE;
in = (in + 1) %
/ * consume the item in
BUFFER_SIZE;
next consumed * /
} CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC
}
Interprocess Communication:Shared
Memory
An area of memory shared among the processes
that wish to communicate
The communication is under the control of the
users processes not the operating system.
Major issues is to provide mechanism that will
allow the user processes to synchronize their
actions when they access shared memory.
Synchronization is discussed in great details in
next topic.

CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC

Interprocess Communication:Message
Passing
 Mechanism for processes to communicate and to synchronize
their actions
 Message system – processes communicate with each other
without resorting to shared variables
 IPC facility provides two operations:
 send(message)
 receive(message)
 The message size is either fixed or variable
 If processes P and Q wish to communicate, they need to:
 Establish a communication link between them
 Exchange messages via send/receive

CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC

 Message Passing (Cont.)
 Implementation issues:
 How are links established?
 Can a link be associated with more than two processes?
 How many links can there be between every pair
of communicating processes?
 What is the capacity of a link?
 Is the size of a message that the link can
accommodate fixed or
variable?
 Is a link unidirectional or bi-directional?
 Implementation of communication link
 Physical: Shared memory, Hardware bus &
Network
 Logical: Direct or indirect,
CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHYSynchronous
/ AP-CSE /AEC or
 Direct Communication
Processes must name each other explicitly:
 send (P, message) – send a message to process P
receive(Q, message) – receive a message from
process Q
 Properties of communication
link
Links are established automatically
A link is associated with exactly one
pair of communicating processes
Between each pair there exists exactly one link
The link may be unidirectional, but is
usually bi- CS3451-IOS/
directionalV. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC
 Indirect Communication
 Messages are directed and received from mailboxes ( ports)
 Each mailbox has a unique id
 Processes can communicate only if they share a mailbox
 Properties of communication link
 Link established only if processes share a common mailbox
 A link may be associated with many processes
 Each pair of processes may share several communication
links
 Link may be unidirectional or bi-directional
 Operations
 create a new mailbox (port)
 send and receive messages through mailbox
 destroy a mailbox
CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC
 Indirect
 Primitives are defined as:

Communication
send(A, message) – send a message to mailbox A
 receive(A, message) – receive a message from mailbox A
 Mailbox sharing
 P1, P2, and P3share mailbox A
 P1, sends; P2and P3 receive
 Who gets the message?
 Solutions
 Allow a link to be associated with at most two processes
 Allow only one process at a time to execute a receive
operation
 Allow the system to select arbitrarily the receiver.
Sender is
CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC
notified who the receiver was.
 Synchronization
 Message passing may be either blocking or non-blocking
 Blocking is considered synchronous
 Blocking send -- the sender is blocked until the message is received
 Blocking receive -- the receiver is blocked until a message is
available
 Non-blocking is considered asynchronous
 Non-blocking send- the sender sends the message & continue
 Non-blocking receive -- the receiver receives:
 A valid message, or Null message
 Different combinations possible
 If both send and receive are blocking, we have a rendezvous
Producer-consumer becomes trivial
message next_produced;
while (true) {
send(next_produced); /*
produce
} an item in next
 Buffering
Queue of messages attached to the link.
implemented in one of three ways
1. Zero capacity – no messages are queued on
a link.
Sender must wait for receiver (rendezvous)
2. Bounded capacity – finite length of n
messages Sender must wait if link full
3. Unbounded capacity – infinite
length Sender never waits

CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC

 Examples of IPC Systems - POSIX
POSIX Shared Memory
Process first creates shared memory segment
shm_fd = shm_open(name, O CREAT | O RDWR,
0666);
 Also used to open an existing segment to share it
Set the size of the object
 ftruncate(shm fd, 4096);
Now the process could write to the shared memory
 sprintf(shared memory, "Writing to shared
memory");

CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC

 Examples of IPC Systems - Mach
 Mach communication is message based
 Even system calls are messages
 Each task gets two mailboxes at creation- Kernel and Notify
 Only three system calls needed for message transfer
 msg_send(), msg_receive(), msg_rpc()
 Mailboxes needed for commuication, created via
 port_allocate()
 Send and receive are flexible, for ex. four options if mailbox
full:
 Wait indefinitely
 Wait at most n milliseconds
 Return immediately
 Temporarily cache a message
CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC
 Examples of IPC Systems – Windows
 Message-passing centric via advanced local procedure call
(LPC)
facility
 Only works between processes on the same system
 Uses ports (like mailboxes) to establish and
maintain
communication channels
 Communication works as follows:
 The client opens a handle to the subsystem’s connection port
object.
 The client sends a connection request.
 The server creates two private communication
ports and
returns the handle to one of them to the client.
The client CS3451-IOS/and
V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC
serveruse the corresponding port
Local Procedure Calls in Windows

CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC

Communications in Client/Server
System
Sockets
Remote Procedure Calls
Pipes
Remote Method Invocation
(Java)

CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC

Thank You
CS3451-IOS/ V. REVATHY / AP-CSE /AEC