Course Computer Systems for AI-programmers

"Computersystemen voor AI-programmeurs"

Week 41, 2011

Description

In this class, the rest of part II of the book will be covered. Part II describes how programs are run on a system. This will give you an understanding of the interactions of your program with the operating system.

We learn how new processes are started, as children of a parent process(typically the shell), and how the parent can control its children by signals.

Virtual memory is an abstraction of main memory, which allows every process to have its 'own' memory. The virtual memory provides three important capabilities. First, it provides as cache to the slow access to pages on the harddisk. Secondly, it provides an efficient way to share memory between processes, as for instance parent and children-processes. Thirdly, it provides a simple way to protection of the memory against wrong usage.

In this class the following concepts are introduced:

• exceptions, interrupts, traps, faults, aborts, exception handling
• processes, user and kernel mode, context switches, system calls
• process creation & termination, reaping, suspension

• virtual address space, physical address space
• page table, virtual pages, physical pages, page faults
• virtual memory areas, user areas, private areas, shared areas

Literature

The class is based on chapters 8 and 9 of the book Computer Systems: A programmer's perspective by R.E. Bryant and D.R. O'Hallaron.

Recommanded reading:

8	Exceptional Control Flow, 8.1 - 8.5.1
9.1	Physical and Virtual Addressing
9.2	Address Spaces
9.3	Virtual Memory as Tool for Caching
9.4	Virtual Memory as Tool for Memory Management
9.5	Virtual Memory as Tool for Memory Protection
9.7.2	Linux Virtual Memory System
9.8	Memory Mapping (until page 844)

Schedule

The class is scheduled in three hours:

1. Lecture(Recording): 'Computer systems - Processes'
   Problem 8.2: How many 'hello' output lines does forkprob1.c print?
   
2. Lecture (Recording): 'Computer systems - the advantages of Virtual Memory'