quartz/content/notes/23-IO-systems.md

title	aliases	tags	sr-due	sr-interval	sr-ease
23-IO-systems		cosc204 lecture	2022-11-04	3	250

interactive between device drivers and IO devices

Hardware

• IO device linked to machine via Port
• link is a set of wires called a Bus
• as each end of the link is a device controller (basically a process)
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device controller registers

• each contoller has registers for holding signals
• CPU can read and write these
• some hold data some control signals

adressesing devices

• each port has an address range
• CPU can issue IO instructions to particular addresses
• communication can be 1 byte at a time for via direct memory access

polling

• CPU cycles waiting for busy bit to be clear is known as polling (busy waiting)
• waste CPU time
• if CPU is polling for input from devices too, then all devices have to be monitored - this is big waste of CPU time

interupts

• used for communcation with IO devices: prefered over polling
• CPU hardware contains wire calld interrupt request line
• if cpu senses this line after each instruction it executes
• if intr sensed, CPU saves its current location and jumps to address in the interrupt vector indicated by the signal
• maskable/nonmaskable
  • deal with different priorities of interrupt
  • maskable: device generated, can be diabled when OS is processing a more urgent intr
  • nonmaskable: for error messges, never disabled

Direct memory access

• sending large amounts of data to IO devices
• special purpose process DMA controller used
• CPU writes a DMA command block into memory, specifying which bytes to transfer, and where to put them
• DMA then controller can then execute concurrently
• after transfer is finsished DMA controller interrupts CPU

IO performance

• reduce context switches
• reduce data copies in memory (normamly two: user memory, device/kernel memory): can mmap to share memory
• reduce number of interrupts (e.g., using polling)
  • it data is coming more frequently polling may be faster than interrupts
• increase concurrency (e.g., DMA)
• move data processing to hardware (e.g., network interface card)
• balance CPU, memory system, bus, IO performance

Zero-copy

• avoid memory copy in IO data transfer
• use dynamic mmap
• copy data from deice directly to user spce e.g., remote direct memory access RDMA
• pass packet buffer pointers between layers of TCP/IP protocol