Operating System Modes - What, Differences, Necessity, Switch

-
Every Operating system supports two modes of operation for it to work properly.

  • User Mode
  • Kernel Mode
X86 Hardware provide four protection rings for these modes. Ring 0 is used for Kernel mode, Ring 3 is used for User mode

Differences


Kernel Mode
User Mode
Can Access any memory location, hardware resources
No direct access to memory and hardware resources
Crash will halt the system
Crash will stop the program that has bug, system will continue
Reserved for lowest-level functions such as memory allocation, file system handling, process handling etc
Most programs such as text editor, media player, browser etc
Necessity of two modes:
  • User program can wipe out the OS by overwriting with user data
  • If something crashes will halts the whole computer
How do we change from one Mode to other

User Mode to Kernel Mode

Using system call such as open, fopen etc, which will raise an software interrupt. On software interrupt, the control code will jump to Interrupt Vector Table of the OS which will handle switching to kernel mode and execute kernel instructions
Kernel Mode to User Mode

Code to switch from kernel mode to user mode is simply an assembly instruction : RTI (Return from Interrupt)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

bb.utils.contains yocto

-
Image
bb.utils.contains  is most commonly used function in Yocto. grep in poky directory returned with 696 count. $ grep -nr 'bb.utils.contains' poky/ | wc -l 696 It's definition is present in 'poky/bitbake/lib/bb/utils.py' file This function returns third argument if the second argument is subset of the first argument else returns fourth argument Let's take an example to understand this. You can see from the above screenshot, when the second argument is a subset of first argument, "present" was returned, else "notpresent" was returned We can also use bb.utils.contains inside if loop. This we can use inside a recipe. if ${@bb.utils.contains('SOMEFLAG','NEWVALUE3','true','false',d)}; then     FOO = 'HELLO' fi
Read more

Difference between RDEPENDS and DEPENDS in Yocto

-
We normally observe these two (RDEPENDS and DEPENDS) whenever we open any recipe. What should we choose when we write our own recipe. DEPENDS -> Build Time Dependency RDEPENDS -> Run Time Dependency DEPENDS: When a recipe 'A' is DEPENDS on recipe 'B'. In this case, Bitbake first builds recipe 'B' and then recipe 'A' E.g. You need 'dbus' to be built before 'wpa_supplicant'. RDEPENDS: When a recipe 'A' is RDEPENDS on recipe 'B'. In this case, Bitbake deploys 'B' on the target system when it deploys 'A'.  E.g. 'perf' RDEPENDS on 'bash' In other words, DEPENDS are those set of packages that should be available while building package, whereas RDEPENDS are set of packages that should be available during execution of the program.
Read more

make config vs oldconfig vs defconfig vs menuconfig vs savedefconfig

-
Image
Building the Linux Kernel is a two-step process: Configuring the Kernel options Building the Kernel with those options. There are many methods available for configuring the kernel. make config: Text-based Configuration.  Options are prompted one after another. All options need to be answered Access to former options is not possible make menuconfig: Menu-driven user interface Allows to navigate forwards and backward directly between features Allows to load and save files with filenames different from ".config" Provides search feature It uses ncurses library for GUI. If the ncurses library is not installed, make menuconfig option fails. To install ncurses library on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev make defconfig: Creates a ".config" file with default options from the ARCH supplied defconfig Configurations are generally stored in the directory: arch/$(ARCH)/configs $ ls arch/x86/configs/ i386_defconfi
Read more