File Manager: Disk Driver Interface for Operating System Pragmatics CSC 159

Abstract

Operating Systems are one of the critical architectural components every Computer Engineering Student should be aware of. Most Operating System course-work is strong on theory and weak on practical. Operating System Pragmatics CSC 159 course at CSUS explains the fundamental principles in great detail, including process management, inter-process communication, semaphores, message passing, input/output, character device drivers, memory management, interrupts, paging and virtual memory. The main aspect of this project is to add an Interface for File Systems and Disk Drivers to the existing course-work model. This project is an extension of existing kernel module designed from the course work CSC 159. The File System Design for this project will be based on collective knowledge gathered during research with many open source File Systems. The Project comprises three stages in development. Each stage includes completion and loading of a module in to the kernel. In stage one, Device Driver for IDE Disk is designed. Both the Interrupt and Busy Polling Mechanisms are used for obtaining status of IDE drive, reading data and writing data. Timer Synchronization and Buffer Management plays an important role to be considered for the design. In stage two, FAT16 File System is designed with basic design taken from an embedded system file system. The Boot Block, FAT Area, Data Area are all manually set by the File System Initialization Routine. The Total Capacity of the File System is also set manually. The above two stages are involved in modules that are considered as part of the existing Operating System, but in the final stage, specific tools are created for loading files to disks apart from operating on the designed existing kernel modules. This feature helps the instructors to load files to the IDE Disk without the operating system being run. This feature is planned to be used in case of emergencies like accidental meta-data over write or kernel crashes.