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Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design
book

Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

by Jean Bacon, Tim Harris
March 2003
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
912 pages
27h 17m
English
Pearson Business
Content preview from Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

27.6. The I/O subsystem

A design aim was that it should be possible to install, and add or remove dynamically, alternative device drivers in an arbitrary layered structure. For example, a number of existing file systems must be supported including MS-DOS's FAT, OS/2's HPFS, the CD-ROM file system CDFS in addition to the 'native' file system NTFS. Drivers should be portable and easy to develop, written in a high-level language.

As in all I/O systems concurrency control is crucial, especially as multiprocessor operation is supported. As always, hardware–software synchronization is needed, as is mutual exclusion from shared buffer space.

The I/O system is packet driven, that is, every I/O request is represented by an I/O request packet (IRP). A ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0321117891Purchase book