Monolithic Systems

By far the most common organization, this approach might well be subtitled “The Big Mess.” The structure is that there is no structure. The operating system is written as a collection of procedures, each of which can call any of the other ones whenever it needs to. When this technique is used, each procedure in the system has a well-defined interface in terms of parameters and results, and each one is free to call any other one, if the latter provides some useful computation that the former needs.

To construct the actual object program of the operating system when this approach is used, one first compiles all the individual procedures, or files containing the procedures, and then binds them all together into a single object file using the system linker. In terms of information hiding, there is essentially none—every procedure is visible to every other procedure (as opposed to a structure containing modules or packages, in which much of the information is hidden away inside modules, and only the officially designated entry points can be called from outside the module).

Even in monolithic systems, however, it is possible to have at least a little structure. The services (system calls) provided by the operating system are requested by putting the parameters in a well-defined place (e.g., on the stack) and then executing a trap instruction. This instruction switches the machine from user mode to kernel mode and transfers control to the operating system, shown as step 6 in Fig. 1-17. The operating system then fetches the parameters and determines which system call is to be carried out. After that, it indexes into a table that contains in slot k a pointer to the procedure that carries out system call k (step 7 in Fig. 1-17).

This organization suggests a basic structure for the operating system:

1. A main program that invokes the requested service procedure.
2. A set of service procedures that carry out the system calls.
3. A set of utility procedures that help the service procedures.

In this model, for each system call there is one service procedure that takes care of it. The utility procedures do things that are needed by several service procedures, such as fetching data from user programs. This division of the procedures into three layers is shown in Fig. 1-24.

Figure 1-24. A simple structuring model for a monolithic system.