Architectural
(hardware) Support for
Operating Systems
• Review of introduction
• Hardware overview
• A peek at Unix
• Hardware (architecture) support
• Summary
Review
• What are the two main responsibilities of OS?
• Manage hardware resources
• Provide a clean set of interface to programs
• Managing resources:
• Allocation
• Protection
• Reclamation
• Virtualization
• Questions?
Why Start With Hardware?
• Operating system functionality fundamentally depends
upon hardware
• Key goal of an OS is to manage hardware
• If done well, applications can be oblivious to HW details
• Hardware support can greatly simplify – or complicate –
OS tasks
• Early PC operating systems (DOS, MacOS) lacked virtual
memory in part because the hardware did not support it
So what is inside a computer
• An abstract overview
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2hmuqS8bwM&feature=related
• An introduction with a real computer
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWzX4MEYOBk