9-2 Final Project Submission – Technical Evaluation of an Operating System
John C. Aghadiuno
Robert C. Pratt, PhD
2/24/2019
Contents
Organizational Profile
Top Secret, Inc. (TSI) is a company that develops and sells embedded operating systems around the world for a variety of devices including camera systems for drones, and alarm systems for top-secret installations. TSI operating systems are highly responsive to sensor input and features includes highly reliable operation, limited memory utilization, small size on disk, and low power consumption.
Due to a bad management decision, the organization decided to use the OS, which they designed for single purpose use, in their enterprise work stations and servers within their organization.
This has, as would be expected, resulted in an increase in costs, low performance, compatibilities issues with modern software, and devices the staff need to get their jobs done, and so on.
Other business-related challenges faced by the organization include the most serious to its reputation and integrity; the security of its data and operating systems. It’s operating system, designed as a single purpose, single use operating system, does not have any security features built-in. Running this software on an enterprise network exposes the organization to serious risks and theft of its data and information.
Evaluation of Operating System
| GPOS Feature |
Profile Criteria |
Student Analysis |
Multiprogramming
|
Tech Description |
TSI OS does not support more than one program running at a time. TSI customers need one program resident, and that is the program that handles sensor input and (e.g., from cameras and motion sensors). |
| Business Requirement |
A back-office operating system requires preemptive multitasking and advanced scheduling features. |
| Application Benefit |
|
| Implementation Tasks |
|
Multiprocessing
|
Tech Description |
TSI OS does not support more than one processor on a physical device. The operating system locks up when interrupts are generated by a second processor. |
| Business Requirement |
Since most processors on the market are multicore, TSI has to purchase old, decommissioned hardware with single-core processors for its data center. |
| Application Benefit |
|
| Implementation Tasks |
|
Multithreading
|
Tech Description |
TSI OS lacks a system call interface beyond basic file open, close, read, and write. As such, it does not provide a CreateThread() or pthread_create() API call like Windows or Linux. |
| Business Requirement |
Back-office applications that offer multithreaded operation hang at launch, so TSI has to use open-source software so that a team of TSI software developers can remove multithreading functionality. |
| Application Benefit |
Incorporating multithreading into TSI’s OS will lead to efficiencies because multithreading allows the OS to run multiple tasks simultaneously. This would also decrease development time, improve OS responsiveness and optimize use of OS resource. |
| Implementation Tasks |
TSI OS should allow multithreading various tasks can be run simultaneously. Tasks including printing, saving, reading, etc. |
Virtual Memory
|
Tech Description |
TSI OS uses a flat memory model without paging. |
| Business Requirement |
As a result, TSI OS administrators in the back office often have to reboot the operating systems when they crash due to insufficient memory. |
| Application Benefit |
The primary benefit would be increased security because of memory isolation. Other benefits include being able to conceptually use more memory than is physically available, by using paging. |
| Implementation Tasks |
TSI’s operating system should be remodeled to use memory paging. |
System Call Interface
|
Tech Description |
As previously mentioned, TSI OS has only a basic system call interface. |
| Business Requirement |
This causes severe software compatibility issues. To get around this limitation at TSI headquarters, developers have had to modify traps to kernel mode and develop custom system call responses. |
| Application Benefit |
|
| Implementation Tasks |
|
Security
|
Tech Description |
Given the fact that TSI OS operates based on sensor input, it does not have any security for log in, file system modifications, or network security. In customer installations, the system is typically located on a closed TCP/IP network, so operators can quickly get access to device statistics. |
| Business Requirement |
As a result, anyone with network access at TSI headquarters can log into any TSI OS server in the back office. |
| Application Benefit |
Implementing strong security including authentication and authorization would safe-guard TSI from threats from hackers, identity theft, copyright theft, etc. |
| Implementation Tasks |
TSI should encrypt all data and communication on all data points including those between sensors, or other inputs, and back offices. Additionally, access to systems should require some form of authentication or authorization mechanism. |
Device Drivers
|
Tech Description |
TSI software developers write custom device drivers for each customer. |
| Business Requirement |
That does not work well for the TSI back office because the variety of devices is so large and sophisticated, TSI developers are unable to code for them. |
| Application Benefit |
|
| Implementation Tasks |
|
Fault Tolerance
|
Tech Description |
Given the device driver limitations of TSI software developers, they are unable to code device drivers for RAID cards. |
| Business Requirement |
As a result, all company data resides on individual SATA and SCSI drives. |
| Application Benefit |
Coding for RAID cards would lead to improved performance and redundancy benefits. |
| Implementation Tasks |
TSI developers should learn to write device drivers that are compatible with RAID cards. |
Recommendation
TSI would benefit greatly from upgrading their OS and providing the ability to execute multiple processes or threads concurrently by using thread-level parallelism, as well as instruction-level parallelism. They would also benefit from adding multi-processing ability where available, if the system supports that. Finally, adding virtual memory management technique would improve the inter-operability and performance of their system.
References
Characteristics of Modern Web Applications. (2018, June 06). Retrieved from Microsoft: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/modern-web-apps-azure-architecture/modern-web-applications-characteristics
