Andy presented another high paced lecture this week, the theme was Deadlock and Inter-Process Communication. This is a continuation of the Process Management topic from last week.
As a recap:
- Deadlocks: Can occur on any multitasking O/S where a single process is given exclusive access to a file, device or resource. Detailed conditions:
- Mutual Exclusion – One process can hold a resource exclusively
- Hold and Wait – A process can request a new resource over time whilst still holding other resources.
- No pre-emption – resources can only be released by the program that is holding them
- Circular Wait – 2 or more processes waiting for resources held the other processes.
Dealing with deadlocks has 4 options; Ignore issue, Detection & Recovery, Prevention (eliminating one of the 4 conditions above from being possible), Avoidance (ie: bankers algorithm).
The next slide introduced Semaphores which are in basis an encoded binary gate that prevents any non-sharable resources from being accessed by more than 1 process at a time. With a semaphore a queue would also need to be implemented to allow programs to submit requests then continue processing other threads whilst the request was waiting.
Inter-Process Communication [IPC] was the next topic, Andy outlined the types of IPC:
- Semaphores
- Pipes (used in command line |, One Way, FIFO, Kernel controlled output flow.)
- Message Queues (like a forum for processes)
- Shared Memory (very efficient but hard to implement, if one process is reading a memory page and another needs to edit it)
The following 3 hour tutorial was all about file sharing. Unix systems, particularly Ubuntu are very easy to configure for file sharing both UNIX – UNIX and UNIX – Windows. Below are the steps to configuring NFS (UNIX) and then SAMBA (Windows):
NFS
$ sudo apt-get install nfs-kernal-server $ sudo apt-get install nfs-common$ sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server start $ sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server stop $ sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart $ sudo vim /etc/exports -> /home/mark/shared-folder 192.168.1.5 (ro,sync) $ showmount -e $ sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.4:/home/mark/shared-folder /home/HomePC/Desktop/LaptopFolder $ df //show mounted $ sudo umount 192.168.1.4:/home/mark/shared-folderSAMBA
$ sudo apt-get install samba $ sudo vim /etc/samba/smb.conf // in [global] section of conf file client plaintext auth = Yes //in Share Definitions [shared-folder] comment = My Shared folder read only = yes path = /home/mclaptop/shared-fold guest ok = yes $ sudo smbpasswd -a mclaptop $ sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart $ sudo apt-get install smbfs //samba client $ sudo mount -t smbfs //192.168.1.5/shared-fold /home/me/here //(shared-fold in smb.conf)Samba seems to be very well put together and after using it a few times in the past I am yet to have any issues with it.