721 - Introduction to SCO UnixWare 7 Internals

Table of Contents

• Course Overview
• Course Objectives
• Prerequisites
• Course Series
• Course Topics

Course Overview

• System administors, programmers, and support engineers who desire to gain a better understanding kernel functions
• Kernel engineers and people porting UnixWare to new hardware platforms.

Introduction to SCO UnixWare 7 Internals is taught with task-oriented lectures and hands-on labs. It is a high-level course that provides pre-requisite skill training for the Writing Device Drivers course.

Course Objectives

• Diagram the UnixWare architecture and explain the functionality of the major components of the kernel
• Define key terms used in discussing internals
• Describe basic features of the Intel 386 through Pentium II hardware as it relates to internals
• Describe the various ways in which the system is switched betwen user and kernel mode, including:
• Traps
• Exceptions
• Interrupts
• Describe the various synchronization methods used by the kernel to protect key resources in single and multi-processor systems
• Describe the UnixWare 7 process and light-weight process architecture and how context-switching happens
• Describe how light-weight processes are scheduled
• Describe the UnixWare 7 virtual memory architecture on Intel processors
• Describe the Virtual File System interface used and list the filesystems supported by UnixWare 7 and list their unique characteristics

Prerequisites

Course Series

721 - Introduction to SCO UnixWare 7 Internals
731 - Writing UnixWare 7 Device Drivers

Course Topics

• Architecture and tasks of the kernel
• Process management
• Memory management
• File I/O management
• Fundamental terms and concepts

• Descriptors & descriptor tables
• Call gates
• Traps/Exceptions/Faults

• System calls
• Traps/Exceptions/Faults
• Signals
• Synchronization

• Process-related system calls
• Description of a process
• Attributes
• Data structures
• The /proc filesystem
• Introduction of LWPs
• LWPs
• Comparing and contrasting with processes and LWP-related system calls
• Attributes
• Data structures
• Introduction to scheduling queues
• Context switching
• Algorithms for key system calls:
• fork()
• exec()
• wait()
• exit()

• Basic concepts
• Scheduling classes and their properties
• Scheduling-related system calls
• Determining when to context-switch

• Basic concepts of virtual memory
• Memory-related system calls
• The UnixWare 7 virtual memory architecture:
• Address spaces
• Segments and drivers
• Pages
• The HAT layer and address translations
• Intel hardware paging
• Paging and swaping scenarios and algorythms:
• Memory usage parameters
• The page-out daemon
• Faults and page-ins
• Kernel memory allocation
• TLB issues

• File I/O system calls
• The Virtual File System (VFS)
• The Virtual Inode (Vnode)
• Disk-based Filesystem implementations and attributes:
• bfs
• cdfs
• dosfs
• s5fs
• ufs and sfs
• vxfs
• Special Filesystem implementations and attributes:
• fifofs
• specfs
• namefs
• procfs
• profs
• Swap-backed filesystems
• memfs

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