UNIX: Terminology I

User Process

A user process is a running instance of some user program (which must have been resident in the filesystem somewhere, such as /bin/ls or /usr/dt/bin/dtmail)



Address Space

Each user process has its own unique address space so that one user process cannot directly violate the memory space of another. The valid ranges of virtual addresses within the address spaces of two distinct processes will often look similar (e.g., executable code normally starts at address 0x10000), but will be mapped by the kernel to different physical memory addresses



Segment

An address space is made up of a number of segments. Typical segment types for a user process are text (executable code), heap (global program data), shared library (mapped in at process creation time) and stack (used to store the processes main stack). You can see the segments comprising the address space for any process using /usr/proc/bin/pmap



32-bit Program

In a 32-bit program virtual memory addresses are formulated using 32-bits, so the addressable range is 0 to 2^32 - 1 - a range of 4GB. This means that a single 32-bit process can address up to 4GB of virtual memory. There was a time when 4GB was a lot of address space, but increasingly programs are finding the need to address more than this



64-bit Program

Similarly, a 64-bit program formulates virtual memory addresses in 64-bits and has an address range of 0 to 2^64 - 1. This is an absolutely vast range of addresses - we can map very large individual segments into a 64-bit address space and we can even leave very large "holes" between the segments



32-bit Kernel

A 32-bit kernel is a kernel that uses 32-bit addresses. Being a 32-bit program, a 32-bit kernel can use at most 4GB to store all its own executable code and data structures. Since the kernel is responsible for all aspects of the system, it must maintain enormous numbers of data structures (e.g., a structure to keep track of every process created in the system, a structure to manage every physical page of memory). As systems become bigger and more complex, the 4GB that a 32-bit kernel has available in which to store its data structures has become ever more crowded



64-bit Kernel

A 64-bit kernel, on the other hand, uses 64-bit addresses and can therefore address a vast amount of memory for storing its own data structures



User Thread

Originally a user process had just a single thread of control. Execution started at the main() function and traced subsequent code and function calls in a single path. To perform tasks in parallel, a process would fork() a child to perform some work



More recently user programs have become multithreaded multiple threads of control. Execution still starts at main() but the process can create additional threads of control through calls to an API. The resulting "user level threads" can perform tasks in parallel, and even run simultaneously in a multi-CPU system



A user process is, therefore, comprised of a number (perhaps only 1 in the single-threaded case) of user threads. These user threads all share the address space of the process within which they reside. Multithreaded applications

usually employ from two to several tens of threads, but some applications are also written to use hundreds or thousands of threads



Kernel Thread

Modern UNIX kernels are also multithreaded, meaning that we have multiple threads of control within the kernel. A typical kernel will have created hundreds or even thousands of kernel threads.



Some kernel threads exist only to support the system calls made by user-level threads. When a user process (i.e., some thread in that process) requires a service of the system (necessarily provided by the kernel) it performs a system call into the kernel, and one of the kernel threads created to support that process performs the requested service



The kernel threads that support a particular process also perform some transparent work on behalf of the process For example, if a process accesses an address in a page that has been paged out to swap this will generate a page fault. Handling this page fault (page in from swap) requires the kernels intervention, and the kernel thread supporting the user thread that "pagefaulted" will perform the necessary work - the user thread will later resume without even knowing that a pagefault took place



Some kernel threads are "pure" kernel threads. These don't perform services directly for user processes, but instead perform background and housekeeping tasks. Examples are pageout, fsflush and the kernel RPC threads



Stack Frame

In C every function that is called has a corresponding stack frame (except for so-called leaf functions where the compiler can sometimes optimize the stack frame away). This provides storage for the CPU registers in use in that function (mostly we'll work within the CPU registers themselves, but at times such as when switching to a new process to run or calling another function from within the current function we may need somewhere to store the current register values). The stack frame also provides storage for the local variables of the function



Not all stack frames are the same size - they vary depending on the number and size of local variables in the function. The minimum stack frame size (one which just provides storage for registers but no local variable storage) is usually less than 100 bytes



Stack

Abstractly, a "stack" is a linear list from which insertions and deletions are made from only one end



The stack for a given thread is a linear list of stack frames. As a function call is made a new stack frame is allocated and inserted at the bottom of the stack. When the function call returns (perhaps after having made further function calls) its stack frame is removed from the bottom of the stack



Stack frames that are logically adjacent in the stack (i.e., the stack frames for two functions one of which has called the other) are usually physically adjacent in virtual memory (the processor instructions that manipulate stack pointers simply increment or decrement the current stack pointer). This means that if we have an area of memory, say one 8K page, allocated to hold a particular thread's stack and have the two adjacent pages (one above and one below this stack page) in use for other purposes that we cannot easily grow the stack outside of the 8K page it started in



User Stack

For a single-threaded process the stack resides within the stack segment of the process address space. The stack segment usually starts out reasonably small (8K) and the initial stack frame (for main) is allocated at the top of this



If during process execution the stack grows to the extent that we will "drop off" the bottom of the stack segment (remember that consecutive stack frames are usually allocated in adjacent memory ranges) the kernel can catch this access and quickly increase the stack segment size (provided no ulimit has been exceeded)



In order to allow for the possibility of stack segment growth, the virtual address range of the initial stack segment is chosen so as to have a virtual address space "hole" below it into which we can grow the stack segment. If instead the initial stack segment were placed immediately adjacent to another address space segment we would not be able to grow the stack segment



For multithreaded user processes, each thread is allocated its own stack at the time it is created (the process starts with one thread and can create others from there). Unlike the single-threaded case, we are unable to dynamically grow the stacks of these threads. The reason is quite simple - leaving the necessary virtual address

space "hole" below each allocated stack into which we could grow can soon exhaust the 32-bit address space (4GB) that a 32-bit process can access



Kernel Stack

All the kernel threads within the kernel share the same address space (just like all user threads within a single multithreaded process share an address space)



Each kernel thread is allocated its own stack at the time it is created. It immediately becomes obvious that it will be difficult to space these stacks in a 32-bit address space in such a way that there is room for growth beneath

every stack while still leaving much room for the kernel to store other material



"Pure" kernel threads always run on their allocated (kernel) stack. User threads run on their allocated stack until such time as they make a system call or until the kernel handles something like a pagefault on their behalf. At this point we switch to running the kernel thread using its allocated stack. When the system call or whatever is complete we return to running the user thread on its stack



source:

sunsolve.sun.com documents