DEVICE MANAGEMENT

Device management in Operating System

Introduction3

Discussions3

Management of the I/O System4

I/O Channels5

I/O Requests5

I/O Traffic controller6

I/O Scheduler6

I/O Device handler6

Conclusion8

References9

Device management in Operating System

Introduction

Device management is an important part of Operating System (OS) management. Despite the multitude of devices that appear and disappear in reality and quick changes in device technology, the Device Manager in OS must manage every peripheral device of the system. It is required for the managing a uniform and steady methodology towards all I/O operations.

It includes data transfer methods, representation of data and the prevention and detection of errors during the handling. No application program is capable of determining its storage criteria; it just hands over the data to the operating system for further procedure (Gallert, 2001).

Discussions

One of the main functions of the operating systems is to control all devices of input and output of data, such as keyboard, mouse, monitors, printers and disks. The parties responsible for the OS devices I / O (Input / Output) should allow a simple form of communication between the devices and the rest of the system (e.g., memory manager, file system, and the process manager), and that is as independent as possible of the type of device, so various hardware can be accessed with the same media (interface) (Tanenbaum& Woodhull, 2008).

The data management is done through a structure of directories and files, the various types of data storage devices do not treat the data as files in directories, in fact, the data is stored in fixed-size blocks, where each has an address of where they are read and changed (Tanenbaum & Woodhull, 2008).

Devices are integrated with an electronic component capable of controlling the rest of the device to control the process of reading and writing and thereby serving as an interface to the same through an exchange of electrical signals. This component is known as electronic controller or adapter through which the device and the OS communicate with the devices. Thus, the modules that are independent of the device as the file system, they can handle the reading and writing of data regardless of which device is used, it can be a hard drive, a floppy disk, a CD / DVD (Tanenbaum & Woodhull, 2008).

Management of the I/O System

The devices involve in device management are of three types. They are;

Dedicated devices: these devices are allocated only to one job at a time, like .plotters, printers or tape drivers. They have a drawback of being allocated to a single user only during the whole process of executing job (Grose, et.al 2001).

Shared devices: these devices have the flexibility in allocating several jobs. The jobs are in control of the device manager for resolving the conflicts according to the agreed strategies.

Virtual Devices: The dedicated devices are transformed to the shared devices, thus forming virtual devices, like the printers are designed with a spooling program for rerouting all the print requests to a disk (Grose, et.al 2001).

These are I/O devices, which are meant to work in harmony with the overall I/O ...