Computer-System Operation:
A modern general-purpose computer system consists of one or more CPUs and a number of device controllers connected through a common bus that provides access to shared memory. Each device controller is in charge of a specific type of device (for example, disk drives, audio devices, and video displays). The CPU and the device controllers can execute concurrently, competing for memory cycles. To ensure orderly access to the shared memory, a memory controller is provided whose function is to synchronize access to the memory. For a computer to start running—for instance, when it is powered up or rebooted—it needs to have an initial program to run. This initial program, or bootstrap program, tends to be simple. Typically, it is stored in read-only memory (ROM) or electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM), known by the general term firmware, within the computer hardware. It initializes all aspects of the system, from CPU registers to device controllers to memory contents. The bootstrap program must know how to load the operating system and to start executing that system. To accomplish this goal, the bootstrap program must locate and load into memory the operating-system kernel. The operating system then starts executing the first process, and waits for some event to occur.
Storage Structure:
Computer programs must be in main memory (also called random-access memory or RAM) to be executed. Main memory is the only large storage area (millions to billions of bytes) that the processor can access directly. It commonly is implemented in a semiconductor technology called dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), which forms an array of memory words. Each word has its own address. Interaction is achieved through a sequence of load or store instructions to specific memory addresses. The load instruction moves a word from main memory to an internal register within the CPU, whereas the store instruction moves the content of a register to main memory. Aside from explicit loads and stores, the CPU automatically loads instructions from main memory for execution.
A typical instruction-execution cycle, as executed on a system with a von Neumann architecture, first fetches an instruction from memory and stores that instruction in the instruction register. The instruction is then decoded and may cause operands to be fetched from memory and stored in some internal register. After the instruction on the operands has been executed, the result may be stored back in memory. Notice that the memory unit sees only a stream of memory addresses; it does not know how they are generated (by the instruction counter, indexing, indirection, literal addresses, or some other means) or what they are for (instructions or data). Accordingly, we can ignore how a memory address is generated by a program. We are interested only in the sequence of memory addresses generated by the running program.
Ideally, we want the programs and data to reside in main memory permanently. This arrangement usually is not possible for the following two reasons:
1. Main memory is usually too small to store all needed programs and data permanently
2. Main memory is a volatile storage device that loses its contents when power is turned off or otherwise lost.
I/O Structure:
Storage is only one of many types of I/O devices within a computer. A large portion of operating system code is dedicated to managing I/O, both because of its importance to the reliability and performance of a system and because of the varying nature of the devices. Therefore, we now provide an overview of I/O.
A general-purpose computer system consists of CPUs and multiple device controllers that are connected through a common bus. Each device controller is in charge of a specific type of device. Depending on the controller, there may be more than one attached device.
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