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An Overview of Unix System Architecture

Internal & Confidential
Table of Contents
1. Overview of Unix OS
2. Salient Features of Unix
3. Unix System Organization
Overview of Unix OS
Internal & Confidential
UNIX SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The Unix operating system was originally developed at AT & T Bell
laboratories in 1969 by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thomson.The early
source code was made available touniversities all over the world.

Programmers at the university of California at Berkeley made significant
modification to the original source and called it as Berkeley Software
distribution(BSD) unix. The most important advance made to the OS
was the addition of networking software.This allow the OS to function in
LAN.

Salient Features of Unix
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Multi-user
Multi Tasking
Communication
Security
Portability

Salient Feature of Unix :


Host machine
Terminals
Terminals
In a multi-user system the same computer resources are accessible by many users. It does
this by time slicing the computer processors at regular intervals between users.

Multi-User
Multitasking implies that it is capable of carrying out more
than one job at the same time.This is managed by dividing the
CPU time intelligently between all processes depending on the
priority of the task it allots small time slots to each foreground
and background task.

Multitasking :
Unix has excellent provision for communicating with
fellow users. The communication may be within the network of a
single main computer or between two or more computer networks.
The users can easily exchange mail,data, programs through such
networks. Distance is not a barrier to pass information or messages
to and fro. It can be two feet away or two thousand miles.

Communication :
Security :
Unix allows sharing of data but not indiscriminately.
The first is provided by assigning login name and password to individual
users.
At the second level, there are read,write and execute permission to
each file which decide who can access it modify it and execute it.
Lastly there is file encryption. This utility encodes your file into unreadable
format, then decrypt it to see the content again.
Portability :
One of the main reason for the universal popularity of Unix
is that it can be ported to almost any computer system. As of today there
are innumerable computer manufacturers around the globe and hundreds
of hardware configuration available. More often than not Unix is running
strongly on each one of them.
Unix System Organization
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Unix System Organization:
The functioning of unix is manned in three levels. On the
outer crust resides the application programs and other utilities, which
speaks out language. At the heart of the unix is the kernel, which
interact with the actual hardware in machine language. The
streamlining of these two modes of communication is done by the
middle layer called the shell.
Unix System Organization:
The kernel is the core of the Unix operating system. It is
the master program that manages all the physical resources of the
computer including:
File systems
Device management
Process management
Memory management
Kernel :
SHELL :
The shell is an interface between the user and kernel. The
primary function of a shell is to be a command interpreter. When a user
logs in, the login program checks the username and password, and then
starts another program called the Shell.
Unix support three primary shells :
Bourne shell (sh)
C shell (csh)
Korn shell (ksh)
Bourne Again Shell (bash)
As an illustration of the way that the shell and the
kernel work together, suppose a user types rm myfile (which has
the effect of removing the file myfile). The shell searches the
filestore for the file containing the program rm, and then requests
the kernel, through system calls, to execute the program rm on
myfile. When the process rm myfile has finished running, the
shell then returns the UNIX prompt % to the user, indicating that it is
waiting for further commands.

SHELL :

END OF UNIX ARCHITECTURE