CIS-4020 (Operating Systems) Home Page

This is the home page for Peter Chapin's CIS-4020 course notes for the Fall 2024 semester. Here you will find class handouts, slides used during the lectures, homework assignments, and links to other references of interest.

The lectures will be via Zoom.

• The course syllabus gives an overview of the course and its content, lists course resources, and describes the grading policy and related issues.
• The texts are in a curated playlist in the O'Reilly Collection. Use your VSC credentials to access it.
• The homework submission area and grade book are on Canvas. All other course resources are here.
• I have prepared a document that gives hints about how to work effectively with a Linux terminal.
• DevBox and HackBox. These are Linux virtual machines running Ubuntu 24.04 that support this course. Download links are below. The virtual machines below are known to work with VirtualBox 7.0.20 and its associated extension pack. They are likely to work fine with other versions of VirtualBox close to that.
• During part of this class, you will work with a file system driver for Linux called GenericFS.

Topics

The lectures for this course will be taught via Zoom. The labs are face-to-face.

• 2024-08-26. Introduction to the class. Overview of DevBox & HackBox. Described the distinction between monolithic kernels and microkernels.
• 2024-08-28. Described more details about networking in DevBox & HackBox. Demonstrated cscope and gave a whirlwind tour of the Linux kernel source.
• 2024-09-04. Discussed system calls, the /proc file system, and the strace command.
• 2024-09-09. Discussed Lab #3 on counting system calls. Demonstrated the skeleton module.
• 2024-09-11. Reviewed selected C features of interest to OS developers.
• 2024-09-16. Discussed processes. Talked about the importance of multiprogramming.
• 2024-09-18. Continued discussing processes.
• 2024-09-23. Discussed the Lab #4 slides. Introduced locking.
• 2024-09-25. Finished discussing locking. Discussed the producer/consumer problem.
• 2024-09-30. Discussed the fork_demo.c sample. Introduced scheduling.
• 2024-10-02. Reviewed revised fork watcher slides. Described the scheduling simulation lab and its simulation results.
• 2024-10-07. No class (Vacation).
• 2024-10-09. No class (Vacation).
• 2024-10-14. Introduced memory management.
• 2024-10-16. Continued discussion of memory management.
• 2024-10-21. Demonstrated the memory_demo.c program and discussed various tools on Linux for measuring and monitoring memory consumption. Also introduced GenericFS.
• 2024-10-23. Demonstrated the shared_memory_server.c and shared_memory_client.c programs. Started discussing the structure of POSIX-like file systems.
• 2024-10-28. Described the organization of the GenericFS project. Started discussing the GenericFS file system layout (overall partition organization, inodes, free maps).
• 2024-10-30. Demonstrated the memory_mapped_file.c program.
• 2024-11-04. Demonstrated the FileVector.hpp library unit. Started describing the main file of the driver (super.c).
• 2024-11-06. Discussed the upgrade of the GenericFS driver from kernel 5.x support to kernel 6.9.3 support. Introduced the correspondence between the GenericFS driver and the ext2 driver.
• 2024-11-11. No class.
• 2024-11-13. Discussed various advanced file system features and how they might be implemented.
• 2024-11-18. Discussed file system consistency checking at both the block and inode levels.
• 2024-11-20. Discussed the GenericFS lab. Introduced microkernels, QNX, and distributed operating systems.
• 2024-11-25. No class (Vacation).
• 2024-11-27. No class (Vacation).
• 2024-12-02. Discussed Homework #10 and real-time operating systems.
• 2024-12-04. Further discussion about the GenericFS lab.
• 2024-12-09. Described several QNX samples.
• 2024-12-11. Gave an overview of Phoenix.

Slides

• Introduction
• C Programming Language with an emphasis on features related to kernel programming.
• Processes
• Locking
• Scheduling
• Memory Basics
• POSIX File Systems (from the GenericFS project)
• File System Features (from the GenericFS project)
• Microkernels
• Distributed Operating Systems
• Real-Time Operating Systems
• Virtual Machines

Samples

1. The "Hello, World" program in assembly language demonstrating the use of raw system calls: x86_64 Linux, arm64 Linux, arm64 macOS.
2. The fork_demo.c sample demonstrates how the fork function can be used in application space to create a new process.
3. The memory_demo.c sample demonstrates how a C program can allocate more memory than is physically available. The comments in the file mention which tools you can use (on Linux) to view the effects of the program when it pauses.
4. The shared_memory_server.c and shared_memory_client.c samples demonstrate how to use POSIX-style shared memory in C programs.
5. The memory_mapped_file.c sample demonstrates how to use the mmap function to make the contents of a file appear in a range of virtual memory locations.
6. The FileVector.hpp sample demonstrates memory-mapped files using the Windows API. The code is in C++ and attempts to make a memory-mapped file of "plain old data" (POD) structures behave as an ordinary C++ library vector.
7. In class, I discussed several small QNX sample programs that you might find interesting to explore.

Homework

1. Homework #01. (Due: 2024-09-06) System Calls
2. Homework #02. (Due: 2024-09-27) The Sequence File API
3. Homework #03. (Due: 2024-10-25) Selected C Topics.
4. Homework #10. (Due: 2024-12-13) File System Layout

Labs

The lab set is summarized in the lab summary document, along with links to specific lab handouts and supporting code samples.

Resources/Articles

The following are links to relevant resources for this class.

• The DevBox and HackBox document describes how to set up and use the virtual machines required for this class. (LaTeX source of the DevBox and HackBox document)
• Compiling Linux describes the procedure for compiling the Linux kernel in detail. This document is for your information only. The kernel has been pre-compiled on the virtual machines we will be using in the lab. (LaTeX source of the Compiling Linux document
• We will be studying Linux kernel 6.9.3. You can download a copy of this kernel from http://www.kernel.org. However, it has been pre-installed on the virtual machines we will be using in the lab.
• I have prepared a document with links to kernel development resources.
• I wrote a C tutorial that you might find useful as a refresher for various aspects of the C programming language.
• I wrote a document describing various advanced file system features (from the GenericFS project) that supplements the corresponding slides on that subject.
• In some labs, we'll be using the Bochs CPU emulator. If you compile Bochs from source, you should enable the Bochs internal debugger.
• My home page contains other resources of potential interest.

LaTeX Resources

For this class, you will be required to use the LaTeX typesetting system to prepare your lab reports. I encourage you to consider using LaTeX for your other formal writing needs even in other classes. This section includes references to materials you can use to help learn the system.

• Lab Report Template. This is a LaTeX document with appropriate sections for CIS-4020 lab reports. To create your own report, copy this document and fill in the sections as needed.
• The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e gives a good overview of LaTeX for beginning and intermediate users.
• Using LaTeX at VTC. This archive contains a document describing how to install LaTeX and giving examples of how to format various constructs of interest to the documents you will prepare for this class.
• This mini-lecture on using LaTeX describes the demonstration document in the sample archive and how to use VSCode for LaTeX development.
• The MiKTeX website. From here you can download the MiKTeX installer for Windows. If you use Linux you can almost certainly install LaTeX from your distribution's package manager (look for the "texlive" and/or "latex" packages).
• The Intel64/IA-32 Software Developer's Manual provides detailed information about the Intel x86_64 processors.

Last Revised: 2024-12-12
© Copyright 2024 by Peter Chapin <peter.chapin@vermontstate.edu>