How to find parent id of pid in Shell script

#!/bin/bash

echo "-- ms1 => $$"
echo "-- ms => $PPID"

Linux Boot Process

Press the power button on your system, and after few moments you see the Linux login prompt.

Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes from the time you press the power button until the Linux login prompt appears?

The following are the 6 high level stages of a typical Linux boot process.

1. BIOS

• BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System
• Performs some system integrity checks
• Searches, loads, and executes the boot loader program.
• It looks for boot loader in floppy, cd-rom, or hard drive. You can press a key (typically F12 of F2, but it depends on your system) during the BIOS startup to change the boot sequence.
• Once the boot loader program is detected and loaded into the memory, BIOS gives the control to it.
• So, in simple terms BIOS loads and executes the MBR boot loader.

2. MBR

• MBR stands for Master Boot Record.
• It is located in the 1st sector of the bootable disk. Typically /dev/hda, or /dev/sda
• MBR is less than 512 bytes in size. This has three components 1) primary boot loader info in 1st 446 bytes 2) partition table info in next 64 bytes 3) mbr validation check in last 2 bytes.
• It contains information about GRUB (or LILO in old systems).
• So, in simple terms MBR loads and executes the GRUB boot loader.

3. GRUB

• GRUB stands for Grand Unified Bootloader.
• If you have multiple kernel images installed on your system, you can choose which one to be executed.
• GRUB displays a splash screen, waits for few seconds, if you don’t enter anything, it loads the default kernel image as specified in the grub configuration file.
• GRUB has the knowledge of the filesystem (the older Linux loader LILO didn’t understand filesystem).
• Grub configuration file is /boot/grub/grub.conf (/etc/grub.conf is a link to this). The following is sample grub.conf of CentOS.

#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS (2.6.18-194.el5PAE)
          root (hd0,0)
          kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.el5PAE ro root=LABEL=/
          initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-194.el5PAE.img

• As you notice from the above info, it contains kernel and initrd image.
• So, in simple terms GRUB just loads and executes Kernel and initrd images.

4. Kernel

• Mounts the root file system as specified in the “root=” in grub.conf
• Kernel executes the /sbin/init program
• Since init was the 1st program to be executed by Linux Kernel, it has the process id (PID) of 1. Do a ‘ps -ef | grep init’ and check the pid.
• initrd stands for Initial RAM Disk.
• initrd is used by kernel as temporary root file system until kernel is booted and the real root file system is mounted. It also contains necessary drivers compiled inside, which helps it to access the hard drive partitions, and other hardware.

5. Init

• Looks at the /etc/inittab file to decide the Linux run level.
• Following are the available run levels
  • 0 – halt
  • 1 – Single user mode
  • 2 – Multiuser, without NFS
  • 3 – Full multiuser mode
  • 4 – unused
  • 5 – X11
  • 6 – reboot
• Init identifies the default initlevel from /etc/inittab and uses that to load all appropriate program.
• Execute ‘grep initdefault /etc/inittab’ on your system to identify the default run level
• If you want to get into trouble, you can set the default run level to 0 or 6. Since you know what 0 and 6 means, probably you might not do that.
• Typically you would set the default run level to either 3 or 5.

6. Runlevel programs

• When the Linux system is booting up, you might see various services getting started. For example, it might say “starting sendmail …. OK”. Those are the runlevel programs, executed from the run level directory as defined by your run level.
• Depending on your default init level setting, the system will execute the programs from one of the following directories.
  • Run level 0 – /etc/rc.d/rc0.d/
  • Run level 1 – /etc/rc.d/rc1.d/
  • Run level 2 – /etc/rc.d/rc2.d/
  • Run level 3 – /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/
  • Run level 4 – /etc/rc.d/rc4.d/
  • Run level 5 – /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/
  • Run level 6 – /etc/rc.d/rc6.d/
• Please note that there are also symbolic links available for these directory under /etc directly. So, /etc/rc0.d is linked to /etc/rc.d/rc0.d.
• Under the /etc/rc.d/rc*.d/ directories, you would see programs that start with S and K.
• Programs starts with S are used during startup. S for startup.
• Programs starts with K are used during shutdown. K for kill.
• There are numbers right next to S and K in the program names. Those are the sequence number in which the programs should be started or killed.
• For example, S12syslog is to start the syslog deamon, which has the sequence number of 12. S80sendmail is to start the sendmail daemon, which has the sequence number of 80. So, syslog program will be started before sendmail.

CPU Stats

The 7 cpu statistics explained

There are several different ways to see the various CPU statistics. The most common is probably using the top command.

To start the top command you just type top at the command line:

The output from top is divided into two sections. The first few lines give a summary of the system resources including a breakdown of the number of tasks, the CPU statistics, and the current memory usage. Beneath these stats is a live list of the current running processes. This list can be sorted by PID, CPU usage, memory usage, and so on.

The CPU line will look something like this:

%Cpu(s): 24.8 us,  0.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 73.6 id,  0.4 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.2 si,  0.0 st

24.8 us - This tells us that the processor is spending 24.8% of its time running user space processes. A user space program is any process that doesn't belong to the kernel. Shells, compilers, databases, web servers, and the programs associated with the desktop are all user space processes. If the processor isn't idle, it is quite normal that the majority of the CPU time should be spent running user space processes.

73.6 id - Skipping over a few of the other statistics, just for a moment, the id statistic tell us that the processor was idle just over 73% of the time during the last sampling period. The total of the user space percentage - us, the niced percentage - ni, and the idle percentage - id, should be close to 100%. Which it is in this case. If the CPU is spending a more time in the other states then something is probably awry - see the Troubleshooting section below.

0.5 sy - This is the amount of time that the CPU spent running the kernel. All the processes and system resources are handled by the Linux kernel. When a user space process needs something from the system, for example when it needs to allocate memory, perform some I/O, or it needs to create a child process, then the kernel is running. In fact the scheduler itself which determines which process runs next is part of the kernel. The amount of time spent in the kernel should be as low as possible. In this case, just 0.5% of the time given to the different processes was spent in the kernel. This number can peak much higher, especially when there is a lot of I/O happening.

0.0 ni - As mentioned above, the priority level a user space process can be tweaked by adjusting its niceness. The ni stat shows how much time the CPU spent running user space processes that have been niced. On a system where no processes have been niced then the number will be 0.

0.4 wa - Input and output operations, like reading or writing to a disk, are slow compared to the speed of a CPU. Although this operations happen very fast compared to everyday human activities, they are still slow when compared to the performance of a CPU. There are times when the processor has initiated a read or write operation and then it has to wait for the result, but has nothing else to do. In other words it is idle while waiting for an I/O operation to complete. The time the CPU spends in this state is shown by the wa statistic.

0.0 hi & 0.2 si - These two statistics show how much time the processor has spent servicing interrupts. hi is for hardware interrupts, and si is for software interrupts. Hardware interrupts are physical interrupts sent to the CPU from various peripherals like disks and network interfaces. Software interrupts come from processes running on the system. A hardware interrupt will actually cause the CPU to stop what it is doing and go handle the interrupt. A software interrupt doesn't occur at the CPU level, but rather at the kernel level.

0.0 st - This last number only applies to virtual machines. When Linux is running as a virtual machine on a hypervisor, the st (short for stolen) statistic shows how long the virtual CPU has spent waiting for the hypervisor to service another virtual CPU running on a different virtual machine. Since in the real-world these virtual processors are sharing the same physical processor(s) then there will be times when the virtual machine wanted to run but the hypervisor scheduled another virtual machine instead.