6.033 | Spring 2018 | Undergraduate

Computer System Engineering

Week 3: Operating Systems Part III

Lecture 5 Outline

Students: This lecture involved looking at the details of a lot of code. Please see the slides for those implementations: yield(), wait(), yield_wait().

  1. Introduction
    • Today: get rid of assumption that we only have one program per CPU.
    • Sharing CPU is a problem because one program can block another.
  2. Threads
    • thread = virtual processor
    • API: suspend(), resume()
    • Need to capture program’s state: value of all registers, all of its memory.
    • Big question: when to suspend/resume a thread?
  3. yield()
    • Command to tell kernel that thread is waiting for an event.
    • Implementation does three things: Suspends running thread, chooses new thread to run, resumes new thread.
      • Data structures: Threads table, CPUs table, t_lock.
      • Suspending current thread: Save stack pointer and page-table register.
      • Choosing a new thread: Round-robin fashion until we hit a RUNNABLE thread (perhaps the one that just called yield).
      • Resuming new thread: Reload state.
    • All of this happens as an atomic action.
  4. Condition Variables
    • Allow kernel to notify threads instead of having threads constantly make checks.
    • “Lost notify” problem:
      • T1 has lock on buffer, finds it full, releases lock.
      • Prior to T1 calling wait, T2 acquires lock, reads message, notifies waiting threads that the buffer is not full.
      • ..but T1 is not yet waiting; it was interrupted before it could call wait.
    • Solution: API is wait(cv, lock), not wait(cv)..
      • when a thread calls wait, it goes to sleep and releases the lock.
    • Wait implementation:
      • requires a different version of yield() — yield_wait() — to prevent deadlock.
      • yield_wait() releases and re-acquires t_lock in the middle, and must point to a special stack to prevent stack corruption.
  5. Preemption
    • If a thread never calls yield or wait, it’s okay; special hardware will periodically generate an interrupt and forcibly call yield.
    • ..But what if this interrupt occurs while the CPU is running yield()? Deadlock.
    • Solution: Hardware mechanism to disable interrupts.
  6. Reflection/Summary
    • We’ve enforced modularity on a single machine, assuming that the OS itself is indeed correct.
    • Locks and threads are interesting: we needed them to get bounded buffers to work, but they bring up modularity issues. We had to reason globally about locks.
    • To truly enforce modularity, we needed kernel and/or hardware support.

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Spring 2018
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