The design of Unix Operating System (1) overview of System V

• Execution of Unix processes could be devided into two levels: User mode and Kernel mode. Many other systems like Windows have more levels, but for Unix, two levels are enough.  The differences of these two levels are:
  • User mode process could access only their own instructions and data; while Kernel mode process could access both user and kernel instructions and data. A virtual address of a process could be devided into kernel mode only address and kernel/user mode address.
  • Process in user mode could not execute some privileged instructions, like operating on processor or register, or it will cause error.
• The system will attempt to restart the instruction after it caused an exception; and the system will continue the next instruction after it has serviced the interupt. But the system provides one mechanism to handle both exception and interupt.
• Processors execution levels, from top to low:

Machine Errors

Clock

Disk

Network Devices

Terminals

Software Interrupts

• The kernel resides in the main memory PERMANENTLY, while the currently running process resides in the memory as well(maybe not all, but  at least part of it).