Task Control: Signals and Alarms Chapter 7 and 8

1. Task Control:Signals and AlarmsChapter 7 and 8 B. Ramamurthy

2. Multi-tasking • How to create multiple tasks? Ex: Xinu create() • How to control them? • ready() • resched() • How to synchronize them? How to communicate among them? • XINU: semaphores, send and receive messages • How to (software) interrupt a process? signals

3. Examples • Consider g++ myProg.c • You want to kill this process after you started the compilation..hit cntrl-C • Consider execution of a program called “badprog” >badprog It core dumps .. What happened? The error in the program results in a signal to kernel to stop and dump the offending code • Consider “kill –p <pid>” • Kill issues a termination signal to the process identified by the pid

4. Linux Processes • Similar to XINU Procs. • Lets understand how to create a linux process and control it. • Chapter 7 and 8 of text book. • Chapter 7 : multi-tasking • Chapter 8: Task communication and synchronization

5. Process creation • Four common events that lead to a process creation are: 1) When a new batch-job is presented for execution. 2) When an interactive user logs in / system initialization. 3) When OS needs to perform an operation (usually IO) on behalf of a user process, concurrently with that process. 4) To exploit parallelism an user process can spawn a number of processes.

6. Termination of a process • Normal completion, time limit exceeded, memory unavailable • Bounds violation, protection error, arithmetic error, invalid instruction • IO failure, Operator intervention, parent termination, parent request, killed by another process • A number of other conditions are possible. • Segmentation fault : usually happens when you try write/read into/from a non-existent array/structure/object component. Or access a pointer to a dynamic data before creating it. (new etc.) • Bus error: Related to function call and return. You have messed up the stack where the return address or parameters are stored.

7. Process control • Process creation in unix is by means of the system call fork(). • OS in response to a fork() call: • Allocate slot in the process table for new process. • Assigns unique pid to the new process.. • Makes a copy of the process image, except for the shared memory. • both child and parent are executing the same code following fork() • Move child process to Ready queue. • it returns pid of the child to the parent, and a zero value to the child.

8. Process control (contd.) • All the above are done in the kernel mode in the process context. When the kernel completes these it does one of the following as a part of the dispatcher: • Stay in the parent process. Control returns to the user mode at the point of the fork call of the parent. • Transfer control to the child process. The child process begins executing at the same point in the code as the parent, at the return from the fork call. • Transfer control another process leaving both parent and child in the Ready state.

9. Process Creation (contd.) Parent process create children processes, which, in turn create other processes, forming a tree of processes Generally, process identified and managed via a process identifier (pid) Resource sharing Parent and children share all resources Children share subset of parent’s resources Parent and child share no resources Execution Parent and children execute concurrently Parent waits until children terminate

10. Process Termination Process executes last statement and asks the operating system to delete it (exit) Output data from child to parent (via wait) Process’ resources are deallocated by operating system Parent may terminate execution of children processes (abort) Child has exceeded allocated resources Task assigned to child is no longer required If parent is exiting Some operating system do not allow child to continue if its parent terminates All children terminated - cascading termination

11. Example Code • intretVal; • printf(" Just one process so far\n"); • printf(" Invoking/Calling fork() system call\n"); • retVal = fork(); /* create new process*/ • if (retVal == 0) • printf(" I am the child %d \n",getpid()); • else if (retVal > 0) • printf(" I am the parent, child has pid %d \n", retVal); • else • printf(" Fork returned an error %d \n", retVal);

12. Signals • Signals provide a simple method for transmitting software interrupts to UNIX process • Signals cannot carry information directly, which limits their usefulness as an general inter-process communication mechanism • However each type of signal is given a mnemonic name; Ex: SIGINT • See signal.h for others • SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGILL, SIGTRAP, SIGFPE, SIGKILL • SIGALRM (sent by kernel to a process after an alarm timer has expired) • SIGTERM • signal (signal id, function) simply arms the signal

13. Intercept Signals Task1 Task2 Two essential parameters are destination process identifier and the signal code number: kill (pid, signal) Signals are a useful way of handling intermittent data arrivals or rare error conditions.

14. Handling Signals • Look at the examples: • Catching SIGALRM • Ignoring SIGALRM • sigtest.c • sigHandler.c • pingpong.c • See /usr/include/sys/iso/signal_iso.h for signal numbers

15. Signals and Alarms #include <signal.h> unsigned int alarm( unsigned int seconds ); alarm(a); will start a timer for a secsonds and will interrupt the calling process after a secs. time(&t); will get you current time in the variable t declared as time_t t ctime(&t); will convert time to ascii format

16. Sample programs • Starting new tasks in linux: page 165 • Programs in pages: 174-180 on signals and alarms • See demos directory for first • See page 175 for the second program • See page 178 … for the second program

17. Pingpong Parent PSIG 43 Child CSIG 42

18. Volatile (from code reading: last lecture) • A variable should be declared volatile whenever its value could change unexpectedly. In practice, only three types of variables could change: • Memory-mapped peripheral registers • Global variables modified by an interrupt service routine • Global variables within a multi-threaded application