Operating

Systems: Week-5
Internals Concurrency: Mutual
and Design
Principles Exclusion and
Synchronization
 Operating Systems:
Internals and Design Principles

“ Designing correct routines for controlling concurrent activities proved

to be one of the most difficult aspects of systems programming. The
ad hoc techniques used by programmers of early multiprogramming
and real-time systems were always vulnerable to subtle programming
errors whose effects could be observed only when certain relatively
rare sequences of actions occurred. The errors are particularly difficult
to locate, since the precise conditions under which they appear are
very hard to reproduce.”

—THE COMPUTER SCIENCE AND

ENGINEERING RESEARCH STUDY,

MIT Press, 1980

 Multiple Processes
 Operating System design is concerned
with the management of processes and
threads:
 Multiprogramming
 Multiprocessing
 Distributed Processing
 Concurrency
Arises in Three Different Contexts:

Multiple
Applications
Structured
Applications Operating
invented to allow System
processing time to Structure
be shared among extension of
active applications modular design
and structured
programming OS themselves
implemented as a
set of processes or
threads
 Principles of Concurrency
 Interleaving and overlapping
 can be viewed as examples of concurrent processing
 both present the same problems
 Uniprocessor – the relative speed of execution of
processes cannot be predicted
 depends on activities of other processes
 the way the OS handles interrupts
 scheduling policies of the OS
 Difficulties of Concurrency
 Sharing of global resources
 Difficult
for the OS to manage the allocation
of resources optimally
 Difficultto locate programming errors as
results are not deterministic and reproducible
 Race Condition
 Occurs when multiple processes or
threads read and write data items
 Thefinal result depends on the order of
execution
 the “loser” of the race is the process that
updates last and will determine the final
value of the variable
 Operating System Concerns
 Design and management issues raised by the existence of
concurrency:
 The OS must:
 be able to keep track of various processes
 allocate and de-allocate resources for each active
process
 protect the data and physical resources of each process
against interference by other processes
 ensure that the processes and outputs are independent of
the processing speed
 Resource Competition
 Concurrent processes come into conflict when they are
competing for use of the same resource
 for example: I/O devices, memory, processor time, clock

In the case of competing processes three

control problems must be faced:

• the need for mutual exclusion

• deadlock
• starvation
 Requirements for Mutual
Exclusion
 Must be enforced
 A process that halts must do so without interfering
with other processes
 No deadlock or starvation
 A process must not be denied access to a critical section
when there is no other process using it
 No assumptions are made about relative process speeds or
number of processes
 A process remains inside its critical section for a finite time
only
 Mutual Exclusion:
Hardware Support
• Interrupt Disabling • Disadvantages:
– uniprocessor system – the efficiency of execution
could be noticeably
– disabling interrupts degraded
guarantees mutual
exclusion – this approach will not
work in a multiprocessor
architecture
 Mutual Exclusion:
Hardware Support
 Special Machine Instructions
 Compare&Swap Instruction
 also called a “compare and exchange
instruction”
 a compare is made between a memory value
and a test value
 if the values are the same a swap occurs
 carried out atomically
 Special Machine Instruction:
Advantages
 Applicable to any number of processes on
either a single processor or multiple
processors sharing main memory
 Simple and easy to verify
 It can be used to support multiple critical
sections; each critical section can be defined
by its own variable
 Special Machine Instruction:
Disadvantages
 Busy-waiting is employed, thus while a
process is waiting for access to a critical
section it continues to consume processor
time
 Starvation is possible when a process leaves a
critical section and more than one process is
waiting
 Deadlock is possible
 Semaphore

A variable that has an There is no way to

integer value upon inspect or manipulate
which only three semaphores other than
operations are defined: these three operations

1) May be initialized to a nonnegative integer value

2) The semWait operation decrements the value
3) The semSignal operation increments the value
 Consequences

There is no way to
know which process You don’t know
There is no way to
will continue whether another
know before a
immediately on a process is waiting so
process decrements a
uniprocessor system the number of
semaphore whether it
when two processes unblocked processes
will block or not
are running may be zero or one
concurrently
 Strong/Weak Semaphores
 A queue is used to hold processes waiting on the semaphore

Strong Semaphores
• the process that has been blocked the longest is
released from the queue first (FIFO)

Weak Semaphores
• the order in which processes are removed from the
queue is not specified
Producer/Consumer Problem

General
Situation: The Problem:
• ensure that the
• one or more producers are
producer can’t add
generating data and placing data into full buffer
these in a buffer
and consumer can’t
• a single consumer is taking
remove data from
items out of the buffer one an empty buffer
at time
• only one producer or
consumer may access the
buffer at any one time
Buffer Structure
 Implementation of
Semaphores
 Imperativethat the semWait and semSignal
operations be implemented as atomic primitives
 Can be implemented in hardware or firmware
 Softwareschemes such as Dekker’s or
Peterson’s algorithms can be used
 Useone of the hardware-supported schemes
for mutual exclusion
 Monitors
 Programming language construct that provides
equivalent functionality to that of semaphores and is
easier to control
 Implemented in a number of programming languages
 including Concurrent Pascal, Pascal-Plus, Modula-2,
Modula-3, and Java
 Has also been implemented as a program library
 Software module consisting of one or more
procedures, an initialization sequence, and local data
 Monitor Characteristics
Local data variables
are accessible only
by the monitor’s
procedures and not Only one process
by any external may be executing in
procedure the monitor at a time

Process enters
monitor by invoking
one of its procedures
 Synchronization
 Achieved by the use of condition variables that are
contained within the monitor and accessible only
within the monitor
 Condition variables are operated on by two functions:
 cwait(c): suspend execution of the calling process on
condition c
 csignal(c): resume execution of some process blocked
after a cwait on the same condition
Structure of a Monitor

Figure 5.15 Structure of a Monitor

 Message Passing
 When processes interact with one another two
fundamental requirements must be satisfied:

synchronization communication
• to enforce mutual • to exchange
exclusion information

 Message Passing is one approach to providing both of

these functions
 works with distributed systems and shared memory multiprocessor and
uniprocessor systems
 Message Passing
 The actual function is normally provided in the form of
a pair of primitives:
send (destination, message)
receive (source, message)
 A process sends information in the form of a message
to another process designated by a destination
 A process receives information by executing the
receive primitive, indicating the source and the
message
 Synchronization
When a r
executed eceive primitive
in a proc is
es s the
a message two possi re are
Communication of sses bilities:
between two proce n if there
atio
implies synchroniz i
process s no waiting me
between the two i s
arrives s blocked until sage the
o a
execute, r the process co message
abandon n
ing the a tinues to
receive ttempt t
no t o
the receiver can til
g e un
receive a messa by if a mess
ag
it has been sent been sen e has previously
t
another process received the message is
and exe
continue cution
s
 Blocking Send,
Blocking Receive
 Both
sender and receiver are blocked until the
message is delivered
 Sometimes referred to as a rendezvous
 Allowsfor tight synchronization between
processes
 Nonblocking Send
Nonblocking send, blocking receive
• sender continues on but receiver is blocked until the
requested message arrives
• most useful combination
• sends one or more messages to a variety of destinations as
quickly as possible
• example -- a service process that exists to provide a service
or resource to other processes

Nonblocking send, nonblocking receive

• neither party is required to wait
 Addressing
 Schemes for specifying processes in send
and receive primitives fall into two
categories:

Direct Indirect
addressing addressing
 Direct Addressing
 Send primitive includes a specific identifier of
the destination process
 Receive primitive can be handled in one of two
ways:
 require that the process explicitly designate
a sending process
 effective for cooperating concurrent processes
 implicit addressing
 source parameter of the receive primitive possesses a value
returned when the receive operation has been performed
 Indirect Addressing

Messages are sent to a Queues are

shared data structure
consisting of queues that can referred to as
temporarily hold messages mailboxes

One process sends a

Allows for greater message to the mailbox
flexibility in the and the other process picks
use of messages up the message from the
mailbox
Indirect Process
C
o
m
m
un
ica
tio
n
General Message Format
 Readers/Writers Problem
 A data area is shared among many processes
 some processes only read the data area, (readers) and
some only write to the data area (writers)
 Conditions that must be satisfied:
1. any number of readers may simultaneously
read the file
2. only one writer at a time may write to the file
3. if a writer is writing to the file, no reader may
read it
Messages Summary
• Useful for the enforcement of mutual exclusion discipline

Operating system themes are:

• Multiprogramming, multiprocessing, distributed processing
• Fundamental to these themes is concurrency
• issues of conflict resolution and cooperation arise

Mutual Exclusion
• Condition in which there is a set of concurrent processes, only one of
which is able to access a given resource or perform a given function
at any time
• One approach involves the use of special purpose machine
instructions

Semaphores
• Used for signaling among processes and can be readily used to
enforce a mutual exclusion discipline
End