This week, we learned about how the operating system manages I/O and file systems. The specific topics covered were I/O devices, hard disk drives, RAID, files and directories, and file system implementation.
Some things about I/O architecture is that buses are there to enable information between CPU(s), RAM, and I/O devices. An I/O bus is a data path that connects a CPU to an I/O device. There are 3 hardware components that an I/O bus is connected to an I/O device: I/O ports, interfaces, and device controllers. Some hardware interfaces of canonical device are the status register (sees the current status of the device), the command register (tells the device to perform a certain task), and the data register (pass data to the device, get data from device). There are many more topics such as polling, interrupts, interrupt handler, disk scheduling, RAID and more. In file implementation we learn things such as the Superblock, inodes, file allocation table, directory structure, reading and writing a file, virtual file system, disk buffer cache, and more!
This was a very enlightening week, as we head to the end of the class.
