Here is from Wiki .
"In computing, an executable file causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions," ( Machine Code ?? )
"Modern operating systems retain control over the computer's resources, requiring that individual programs make system calls to access privileged resources. Since each operating system family features its own system call architecture, executable files are generally tied to specific operating systems."
Well this is my perspective .
Executables cannot be Machine Code as they need to tal to the OS for hardware services ( system calls) Hence executable is just not yet "Machine Code" ... Perhaps it is like some part of the code is actual Machine Code and some parts are just meant to call the Machine code embedded in the Operating system ? Overall it contains some junks of Machine Code - and some junks of codes to call the operating system .
Edited after Damon's Answer :
In the end OS is a set of machine codes . Basically OS would be doing the job of copy pasting user's Machine Code ( created by C Compiler ) and then if the instruction is a system call , the transfer goes to OS memory region for handling it . Now the question is what Machine Code generated in C can do this part ? Like asking to transfer control to OS etc - I suppose its system calls at higher abstraction but under the hood - how does it work .
I get a feeling its similar to chicken egg problem , C creates OS and C uses OS Cant find the exactly how the process goes .
Can anyone break the puzzle for me ?
One thing does not exclude the other. Executables are (unless they are some form of bytecode running in a virtual machine) machine code. However, there are different kinds of instructions, some of which are not usable at certain privilegue levels.
That is where the operating system comes in, it is "machine code" that runs at the highest privilegue level, working as arbiter for the "important" parts and tasks, such as deciding who gets CPU time and what value goes into some hardware register.
(originally comment, made an answer by request)
EDIT: About your extended question, this works approximately as follows. When the computer is turned on, the processor runs at its highest privilegue level. In this "mode", the BIOS, the boot loader, and the operating system can do just what they want. This sounds great, but you don't want any kind of code being able to do just whatever it wants.
For example, the code can tell the MMU which memory pages are allowed to be read or written to, and which ones are not. Or, it can define what address is called if "something special" such as a trap or interrupt happens. Or, it can directly write to some special memory addresses that map ports of some devices (disk, network, whatever).
Eventually, the OS switches to "unprivileged" mode and calls some non-OS code. When a trap or interrupt happens, execution is interrupted and continues elsewhere (as specified by the OS previously), and the privilege level is upped again. Once the interrupt has been dealt with, privilege is taken away, and user code is called again.
If a user program needs the OS to do something "OS like", it sets up parameters according to an agreed scheme (for example in some particular registers) and executes a trap instruction.
This is for example how things like multithreading or virtual memory are implemented. In regular intervals, a timer fires off an interrupt, which stops execution of "normal" code, and calls some code in the kernel (in privileged mode). That code then decides what user process control should returned to, after some kind of priority scheme. Those are the "CPU time slices" that are handed out.
If some process reads from or writes to a page that it isn't allowed, a trap is generated by the MMU. The OS then looks at what happened and where, and decides whether to load some data from disk into some memory region (and possibly purge something else) and change the process' mappings, or whether to kill the process with a "segmentation fault" error.
Of course in reality, it is a million times more complicated, but in principle that's about as it works.
It does not really matter whether the OS or the programs were originally written in C or with an assembler. To the processor, it's just a sequence of machine instructions. Even a python or perl script is "just machine instructions" in the end, only with a detour via the interpreter.
Related
Im studying for the first time "Operating System". In my book i found this sentence about "User Mode" and "Kernel Mode":
"Switch from user to kernel mode" instruction is executed only in kernel
mode
I think that is a incorrect sentence as in practice there is no "switch of kernel". In fact, when a user process need to do a privileged instruction it simply ask the kernel to do something for itself. Is it correct ?
In fact, when a user process need to do a privileged instruction it simply ask the kernel to do something for itself.
But how does that happen? Details are processor (i.e. instruction set architecture) and OS specific (explained in ABI specifications relevant to your system, e.g. here), but that usually involves some machine code instruction like SYSENTER or SYSCALL (or SVC on mainframes) capable of atomically changing the CPU mode (that is switching it in a controlled manner to kernel mode). The actual parameters of the system call (including even the syscall number) are often passed in registers (but details are ABI specific).
So I feel the concept of switching from user-mode to kernel-mode is relevant, and meaningful (so "correct").
BTW, user-mode code is forbidden (by the hardware) to execute privileged machine instructions, such as those interacting with IO hardware devices (read about protection rings). If you try, you get some hardware exception (a bit similar to interrupts). Hence your code (even if it is malicious) has to make system calls, which the kernel controls (it has lots of code related to permission checking), for e.g. all IO.
Read also Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces - freely downloadable. See also http://osdev.org/. Read system call wikipage & syscalls(2), and the Assembler HowTo.
In real life, things are much more complex. Read about System Management Mode and about the (scary) Intel Management Engine.
I am curious because I am reading this OS book which mentions
"User programs always run in user mode, which permits only a subset of the instructions [...]. Generally, all instructions involving I/O and memory protection are disallowed in user mode.
To obtain services from the OS, a user program must make a system call, which traps into the kernel and invokes the OS."
If I/O is not allowed generally in user mode, but let's say I have a program in C++ or Java which asks for input, or let's say something else like a search bar in any program. Whenever I select the search bar (meaning I will write something) then a TRAP instruction is called to invoke the OS (since the OS runs in kernel) to be able to have access to I/O, that is, the keyboard? I am not sure if I follow correctly or what am I getting wrong.
The I/O is not allowed in user mode, but you use Input for applications in the OS, or even with the OS itself there are keyboard commands. If you can use keyboard commands that means the OS is ready for I/O at any time. Then the original statement about I/O instructions being disallowed in user mode.
I am sorry for my ignorance but I am just a little bit confused with these terms and difference between user and kernel. I know the OS runs in kernel mode, and the applications run in the OS, so in the end the applications do have access to I/O.
Don't application need to have the OS deal with there I/O for them?
Meaning, only the OS has the authority to do those type of things...
Am I wrong?
Toss your book in the garbage or use it to line a cat box.
Your apparent paradox is that you think you have to be in kernel mode to do I/O but your book says:
"User programs always run in user mode, which permits only a subset of the instructions"
The resolution to your paradox is that your book is spouting nonsense.
Use programs do not always run in user mode. They frequently run in kernel mode. One of the basic functions of an operating system is to provide a set of kernel mode system services that provide controlled access to kernel mode.
In other words, your instincts here are better than your confusing book's text.
It is important to understand what "user-mode" and "kernel-mode" mean. A process is mapped to memory regions which are user-priviliged, depending on the memory layout. Kernel-mode is basically routines that are in supervisor priviliged memory regions, which are invoked by your program to do the desired work (I/O).
I understand that system calls exist to provide access to capabilities that are disallowed in user space, such as accessing a HDD using the read() system call. I also understand that these are abstracted by a user-mode layer in the form of library calls such as fread(), to provide compatibility across hardware.
So from the application developers point of view, we have something like;
//library //syscall //k_driver //device_driver
fread() -> read() -> k_read() -> d_read()
My question is; what is stopping me inlining all the instructions in the fread() and read() functions directly into my program? The instructions are the same, so the CPU should behave in the same way? I have not tried it, but I assume that this does not work for some reason I am missing. Otherwise any application could get arbitrary kernel mode operation.
TL;DR: What allows system calls to 'enter' kernel mode that is not copy-able by an application?
System calls do not enter the kernel themselves. More precisely, for example the read function you call is still, as far as your application is concerned, a library call. What read(2) does internally is calling the actual system call using some interruption or the syscall(2) assembly instruction, depending on the CPU architecture and OS.
This is the only way for userland code to have privileged code to be executed, but it is an indirect way. The userland and kernel code execute in different contexts.
That means you cannot add the kernel source code to your userland code and expect it to do anything useful but crash. In particular, the kernel code has access to physical memory addresses required to interact with the hardware. Userland code is limited to access a virtual memory space that has not this capability. Also, the instructions userland code is allowed to execute is a subset of the ones the CPU support. Several I/O, interruption and virtualization related instructions are examples of prohibited code. They are known as privileged instructions and require to be in an lower ring or supervisor mode depending on the CPU architecture.
You could inline them. You can issue system calls directly through syscall(2), but that soon gets messy. Note that the system call overhead (context switches back and forth, in-kernel checks, ...), not to mention the time the system call itself takes, makes your gain by inlining dissapear in the noise (if there is any gain, more code means cache isn't so useful, and performance suffers). Trust the libc/kernel folks to have studied the matter and done the inlining for you behind your back (in the relevant *.h file) if it really is a measurable gain.
In full virtualization, what is the CPL of guest OS?
in paravertualiation, CPL of guest OS is 1(ring 1)
is it same in full virtualization?
and I heard that some of the x86 privileged instructions are
not easily handled, thus "binary rewriting" method is required...
how does this "binary rewriting" happens??
I understand that in virtualization, CPU is not emulated.
so how can hypervisor change the binary instruction codes before
the CPU executes them?? do they predict the next instruction on memory and
update the memory contents before CPU gets there??
if this is true, I think hypervisor code(performing binary rewriting)
needs to intercept the CPU every time before some instruction of guest OS is
executed. I think this is absurd.
specific explanation will be appreciated.
thank you in advance..!!
If by full virtualization, you mean hardware supported virtualization, then the CPL of the guest is identical to if it was running on bare-metal.
Xen never rewrites the binary.
This is something that VMWare (as far as I understand). To the best of my understanding (but I have never seen the VMWare source code), the method consists of basically doing runtime patching of code that needs to run differently - typically, this involves replacing an existing op-code with something else - either causing a trap to the hypervisor, or a replacement set of code that "does the right thing". If I understand how this works in VMWare is that the hypervisor "learns" the code by single-stepping through a block, and either applies binary patches or marks the section as "clear" (doesn't need changing). The next time this code gets executed, it has already been patched or is clear, so it can run at "full speed".
In Xen, using paravirtualization (ring compression), then the code in the OS has been modified to be aware of the virtualized environment, and as such is "trusted" to understand certain things. But the hypervisor will still trap for example writes to the page-table (otherwise someone could write a malicious kernel module that modifies the page-table to map in another guest's memory, or some such).
The HVM method does intercept CERTAIN instructions - but the rest of the code runs at normal full speed, thanks to the hardware support in modern processors, such as SVM in AMD and VMX in Intel processors. ARM has a similar technology in the latest models of their processors, but I'm not sure what the name of it is.
I'm not sure if I've answered quite all of your questions, if I've missed something, or it's not clear enough, feel free to ask...
Friends, I am working on an in-house architectural simulator which is used to simulate the timing-effect of a code running on different architectural parameters like core, memory hierarchy and interconnects.
I am working on a module takes the actual trace of a running program from an emulator like "PinTool" and "qemu-linux-user" and feed this trace to the simulator.
Till now my approach was like this :
1) take objdump of a binary executable and parse this information.
2) Now the emulator has to just feed me an instruction-pointer and other info like load-address/store-address.
Such approaches work only if the program content is known.
But now I have been trying to take traces of an executable running on top of a standard linux-kernel. The problem now is that the base kernel image does not contain the code for LKM(Loadable Kernel Modules). Also the daemons are not known when starting a kernel.
So, my approach to this solution is :
1) use qemu to emulate a machine.
2) When an instruction is encountered for the first time, I will parse it and save this info. for later.
3) create a helper function which sends the ip, load/store address when an instruction is executed.
i am stuck in step2. how do i differentiate between different processes from qemu which is just an emulator and does not know anything about the guest OS ??
I can modify the scheduler of the guest OS but I am really not able to figure out the way forward.
Sorry if the question is very lengthy. I know I could have abstracted some part but felt that some part of it gives an explanation of the context of the problem.
In the first case, using qemu-linux-user to perform user mode emulation of a single program, the task is quite easy because the memory is linear and there is no virtual memory involved in the emulator. The second case of whole system emulation is a lot more complex, because you basically have to parse the addresses out of the kernel structures.
If you can get the virtual addresses directly out of QEmu, your job is a bit easier; then you just need to identify the process and everything else functions just like in the single-process case. You might be able to get the PID by faking a system call to get_pid().
Otherwise, this all seems quite a bit similar to debugging a system from a physical memory dump. There are some tools for this task. They are probably too slow to run for every instruction, though, but you can look for hints there.