Chapter 2 Operating system organization

A key requirement for an operating system is to support several activities at once. For example, one might use the fork and exec system calls from Chapter 1 to start both a compiler and a text editor as processes. The operating system must time-share resources such as CPUs and memory among these processes. The operating system must also arrange for isolation between the processes. If one process has a bug and malfunctions, it shouldn’t affect unrelated processes. Complete isolation, however, is too strong, since it should be possible for processes to intentionally interact; pipelines are an example. Thus an operating system must fulfill three requirements: multiplexing, isolation, and interaction.

This chapter provides an overview of how operating systems are organized to achieve these three requirements. It turns out there are many ways to do so, but this text focuses on mainstream designs centered around a monolithic kernel, which is used by many Unix operating systems. This chapter also provides an overview of an xv6 process, the unit of isolation in xv6.

Xv6 runs on a multi-core¹¹ 1 By “multi-core” this text means multiple CPUs that share memory but execute in parallel, each with its own set of registers. This text sometimes uses the term multiprocessor as a synonym for multi-core, though multiprocessor can also refer more specifically to a computer with several distinct processor chips. RISC-V microprocessor, and much of its low-level functionality (for example, its process implementation) is specific to RISC-V. RISC-V is a 64-bit CPU, and xv6 is written in “LP64” C, which means long (L) and pointers (P) in the C programming language are 64 bits, but an int is 32 bits. This book assumes the reader has done a bit of machine-level programming on some architecture, and will introduce RISC-V-specific ideas as they come up. The user-level ISA [riscv:user] and privileged architecture [riscv:priv] documents are the complete specifications. You may also refer to “The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas” [riscv].

The CPU in a complete computer is surrounded by support hardware, much of it in the form of I/O interfaces. Xv6 is written for the support hardware simulated by qemu’s “-machine virt” option. This includes RAM, a ROM containing boot code, a serial connection to the user’s keyboard/screen, and a disk for storage.