User Mode Process and System Calls

Abstract

Chapter 7 covers user mode processes and system calls. It extends the simple kernel of Chap. 5 to support additional process management functions, which include process creation, process termination, process synchronization and wait for child process termination. Then it extends the kernel to support user mode processes and system calls. It shows how to use memory management to provide each process with a private user mode virtual address space that is isolated from other processes and protected by the MMU hardware. It covers and demonstrates the various kinds of memory management schemes, which include one-level sections and two-level static and dynamic paging. In addition, it also covers the advanced concepts and techniques of fork, exec, vfork and threads. Then it shows how to use ramdisk and SD card as file systems to manage kernel and user mode images. It also shows how to develop booter programs to boot up the system kernel from SDC partitions.