Modern Operating Systems - Essay Example

System programming Number Though system computer system administration and investigation was effectivewhen programmers developed codes for system management, the advancement in a computer system feature made it difficult for them. As a result, the developers of modern operating system have integrated various features that eliminate the need for such features. Previously, operating system interface was very complicated. This became very difficult for developers to integrate the features. Previously, most processors that were general purpose did not provide support for Superpages. The means that it was cumbersome for entries in the translation Look side buffer to facilitate effective mapping of a large physical memory region into the virtual address space. The development in modern operating system has simplified system administration by dramatically increasing TLb coverage and reducing TLB misses. It has brought massive system performance improvement for several applications. The most prevalent challenge faced by previous developers was the inability of the operating system to support large pages. This is in regard to allocation fragmentation control and promotion tradeoffs. The developers analyzed the issues and came up with a design that would effectively administer and manage the system (Tanenbaum, 2008). The developers implemented the design in FreeBSD on the Alpha CPU. They also evaluated it in real life environment to ensure that it was effective. Introduction The capability of modern processors to provide virtual memory support was a great privilege to the developers. It enabled them to integrate features that would ensure effective memory management. The current developers have ignored the principles of their craft; they give more concern to the principle of least privilege. This implies that the developers strive at eliminating the need for programmers to develop codes that will track and manage the system. However, the whole process of building robust operating system is labor intensive (Dhamdhere, 2006). The previous version of the operating system was merely control programs that scheduled task, drove peripheral devices and monitor how the system is used. The modern operating systems are very large with a lot of advanced features that handle the management of the system. Modern operating system has features that manage processes, memory and input/output devices. In addition, they manage internet communications, inter-process communications, and web-communication, data transfer over the network, file and directory systems, command language and user interface used to invoke and control programs. The paper examines some methods that current operating system developers have discouraged the least privilege application ways and some of the new ideas that ensure system administration and monitoring (Garrido, Hoganson, & Schlesinger, 2011). The most prevalent model that is more users friendly has advanced features. Though the operating system capabilities are cumbersome to the designers, there are more familiar interfaces such as the UNIX file system. The paper also looks at the security vulnerabilities that exist in this model and propose the solution. It is possible for programmers and administrators to achieve simple system management by use of the integrated features in the modern operating system. With the use of chroot jail system calls, the administrator can configure all the features that will ensure all the setuid executable files are excluded. Discussion The fundamental concepts on which the operating system is created are the memory management, processes, I/O devices security and file management. All these were the basis building tools that will aid administration and assessment of the computer system. The programmers work of writing code to manage these features in the computer system has been reduced by ensuring the operating system features can handle them (Mathew, 2010). The heart of modern operating system is the set of tools that can handle different system calls. This indicates what the operating does as far as system management is concerned. There are several ways of structuring operating system so that it works well. The most critical are hierarchy of layers, virtual machines system, monolithic system, and exokernel and client-server model There are two perspectives that can be used to view the operating system. The first one is as resource managers. Considering the modern operating system from this viewpoint, it is the responsibility of the operating system to control and manage various parts of the system. The developers of the modern operating system including mechanism of ensuring that the operating system manages all the resources effectively (Stallings, 2008). Some of the features that enabled this are batch systems and multiprogramming system. Another important aspect that the developers considered is the hardware. The fact that the operating system interact with the hardware implies that the type and nature of hardware have significant implications on the operating system. Therefore, the developers ensured that the hardware platform where there the operating system will operate is strong enough to accommodate it. This explains why the latest versions of operating systems cannot be supported by the old hardware components such Pentium one and two computers. The integration of administration features in the operating system requires strong hardware components in terms of random access memory, speed of the processor and the type of processors. The nature of input/output components also determines the management capabilities of the operating system. The administration tools also were taken into account in the deadlocks and interrupt management. The modern operating system camouflages the impacts of interrupt by availing a conceptual model resulting process that runs in parallel. This enables the system to create and terminate a process dynamically. The presence of address for each processes simplify the process of identifying the process to start running and terminating. In some operating systems like Linux, it can handle multiple threads that exist in a single application. The operating system schedules these threads independently. The process shares a mutual address space (Bhatt, 2004). There were rampant deadlocks in the older operating system. This was due to the inability of the operating system to handle interprocess communication primitives such as messages, monitors or semaphores effectively. Effective interprocess communication ensures that all the process that run in the machine do not go into their critical regions concurrently. Both inter-process and inter-thread communication is managed by the operating system (Godbole, 2011). The type of scheduling algorithm implement in the operating system development determines its capability to handle management and administration activities. The ability of the developer to separate different types of task that the operating system performs is very significant. Some process or jobs are short to execute while others are long. If these jobs are separated, then the system can manage them effectively (Tanenbaum, 2009). Deadlock is a critical issue in any computer operating system. This process accrues when a set of processes that have been granted permission to access some resources, and requires the access of another resource that is used by another process within the set. All the processes will be blocked from accessing these resources and hence the computer hangs. The developers of modern operating system have tried to avoid deadlock by monitoring state to determine which one is safe (Nutt, 2004). They ensure that the process that is allowed to access the resources has subsequent states that can ensure the process is finished. Those that are unsafe are blocked from accessing the resources The system administration feature that has eliminated the need for programmers to develop codes to manage deadlock is by structural building the system in a manner that deadlock and never occur. A prevalent example is where a process is allowed to utilize a single resource at a time. As a result, the continuous deadlock wait condition is terminated. Another method that the developers used to prevent deadlock is assigning numerical values to resources, and setting the processes to request them in an ascending order. First come first serve algorithm is the most appropriate scheduling algorithm to avoid starvation (Godbole, 2011). On file management, there were various issues that required the programmers to frequently write codes to administer or manage the computer files. The issues accrued due to the fact that the address space of a process cannot store all the information when a process is running. Though the address space can store some information for small application, it is cumbersome for it to handle the information for large application such as those running the airline reservations. Another issue that existed in the old OS is the loss of information when this is terminated. In application such as databases, the computer system has to retain information for quite some time. Loss of such information is detrimental to the computer system. The third issue was the frequent need for the multiple processes to access the information concurrently. For example, a telephone directory left within the address space of a process (Jaeger, 2008). This implies that the other processes cannot access it. As such, the developers designed a way of making the information independent of all the processes. This is automatically managed by the operating system. Some of the solutions that the developers of modern operating system reduce the need of programmers to create codes to manage files include: The possibility of storing massive data and information The ability of information to withstand the termination of the process using it at that particular moment The ability of multiple processes to access the information at the same time. In the modern operating system, the management of the files is done by the operating system, when designing the operating system; the designers put into consideration how file structure, nomenclature, accessibility and security (Bhatt, 2004). Previously, the system programmers had to develop codes that manage lists and bitmap. In the modern operating system, the file system has been made more reliable by integrating features that will enable incremental dumps and having a file recovery program that repairs corrupt files. Other features that enhance file management in modern operating system include read ahead, caching and proper arrangement of blocks of files. Another area that drastic improvement was done in modern operating system is the security that the OS can provide to the information. The information that the company stores in their computer information system is very critical. It can be commercial, technical, legal or financial (Silberschatz & Peterson, 2007). This is why the security measures that the system offers to the user should be maximized. Previously, the system programmers faced a lot of challenges when it comes to ensuring the system security. The most prevalent issues where the malware attacks and system accessibility. Considering the speed at which information technology develops, the traditional operating system was not able to manage and control the malware threats; as such the programmers had to come up with codes that can be run in the system to eliminate these malware. The idea of developing the code became more cumbersome due to the emergence of advanced viruses and Trojan horses. On the other hand, the issue of system accessibility had a lot of issues. It is the operating system that controls the general system accessibility. For a user to use a computer, he or she has to enter a password. These imply that the strength of the password determines the security that the computer has. The administration of the password is done by the operating system. In modern operating system, the malware and access issues have been eliminated completely. The system is able to detect all types of malware programs and report them. More so, the operating system has its own automatic way recovering when a virus causes the system to crash. In addition, several mechanisms that prevent the system crashing are integrated. To manage the access issues, the developers ensured that the hacker cannot crack the password simply. They ensured that all vulnerabilities that exposes the system to any threat of hacking does not exist (Flynn & McHoes, 2010). Conclusion From the discussion and above, it is indisputable that the need for programmers to develop code for system administration and evaluation has been greatly reduced. Some of them such as the accessibility and malware issues have been completely reduced. It has brought massive system performance improvement for several applications. The most prevalent challenge faced by previous developers was the inability of the operating system to support large pages. This is in regard to allocation fragmentation control and promotion tradeoffs. The developers analyzed the issues and came up with a design that would effectively administer and manage the system (Tanenbaum, 2009). The development of the modern operating system has completely changed the computing environment. It addition, the system programmers can concentrate on other programming issues that exist since the load of writing programs to handle system management has been reduced. References Aravind, A, & Haldar, S 2010, Operating System, Pearson Education India. Bhatt, PC 2004, An Introduction to Operating Systems: Concepts and Practice, PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd. Dhamdhere, DM, 2006, Operating Systems: A Concept-based Approach,2E, Tata McGraw-Hill Education. Flynn, I, & McHoes, AM 2010, Understanding Operating Systems, Cengage Learning. Garrido, J, Hoganson, K, & Schlesinger, R 2011, Principles of Modern Operating System, Jones & Bartlett Publishers. Godbole, 2011, Operating System 3E, Tata McGraw-Hill Education. Jaeger, T 2008, Operating System Security, Morgan & Claypool Publishers. Lindsay, S 2012, Operating Systems Uncovered, Digital Kindle. Mathew, S 2010, Prelim Ed- Principles of Modern Operating Systems, Jones & Bartlett Learning. Nutt, GJ 2004, Operating systems, Pearson/Addison Wesley. Silberschatz, A, & Peterson, J 2007, Operating system concept, Addison-Wesley. Stallings, W 2008, Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, Test. Tanenbaum, A 2008, Modern Operating Systems, Pearson Prentice Hall. Tanenbaum, 2009, Modern Operating Systems 2Nd Ed, ce-Hall Of India Pvt. Limited. Tanenbaum, A 2009, Outlines and Highlights for Modern Operating Systems by Andrew S Tanenbaum, Lightning Source Incorporated. Read More