CS 3400: Operating Systems

Fall 2024	Topics	Project	Reading
Aug 19–23	introduction, os interfaces	building and running xv6	xv6 ch 1, 3ep ch 1–2
Aug 26–30	processes and address spaces	hello world OS	xv6 ch 2, 3ep ch 3–5
Sep 2–6 (Labor Day)		multicore, spinlocks
Sep 9–13	stacks, context	coroutines mini-kernel	xv6 ch 3, 3ep ch 12–15
Sep 16–20	synchronization	locks	3ep ch 16–24
Sep 23–27	interrupts, context switching	kernel threads, scheduling	xv6 ch 4
Sep 30–Oct 4	virtual memory	userspace, paging	xv6 ch 5
Oct 7–11
Oct 14–18 (Fall Break)	fork and exec, page tables	modes, system calls	xv6 ch 6, 3ep ch 25–30
Oct 21–25 (Fall Break)			3ep ch 31–34
Oct 28–Nov 1	userspace threads	tour rest of xv6	xv6 ch 7, 3ep ch 6–7
Nov 4–8	userspace memory management		3ep ch 8–11
Nov 11–15	file systems		xv6 ch 8, 3ep ch 35–38
Nov 18–22		malloc and free	3ep ch 39–46
Nov 25–29 (Thanksgiving)	distributed file systems		xv6 ch 9, 3ep ch 47–51
Dec 2–6 (Thursday last day)

Changes to the schedule will be announced in class.

“xv6” refers to the xv6 commentary book, our guide to the xv6 operating system source code.

“3ep” refers to Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, our (free) primary text.

Resourses

To install the tools you need for this class using Debian 12 “Bookworm”:

sudo apt install git build-essential gcc-riscv64-linux-gnu gdb-multiarch qemu-system-misc

Homebrew is a command line tool for MacOS for installing open source software. If you do not already have it, install it here:

From the terminal, start by adding the repository that contains the RISC-V development tools:

brew tap riscv-software-src/riscv

Next install the tools:

brew install riscv-gnu-toolchain

To install qemu:

brew install qemu

If you have an Intel-based Mac, you may also need to run:

brew install riscv-tools

To start with a fresh instance of xv6:

git clone https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv.git

In the main directory you should be able to run make qemu to build and launch the system. Typing ctrl-a x will quit.

Last Updated 12/04/2024