Operating Systems

News

About

Behind every application software, there is an operating system. It is responsible for providing the applications with safe access to the computer hardware, and for implementing standard interfaces and abstractions such as files, windows, or processes. This course provides opportunity to learn about the operating system internals through standard lectures and practical assignments, where the students implement their own working operating system kernel.

Assignments

All assignment deadlines are in AoE. The deadlines for lecture quizzes are always Thursday noon local time.

Schedule

Alternative links: HTML, iCal

Support

We encourage you to use our mailing list as the primary means of communication, both between the lecturers and the students, and among the students themselves. There are also list archives. For subject matter where the mailing list is not suitable, use teachers-nswi004@d3s.mff.cuni.cz or contact either Petr Tůma, Vojtěch Horký or Lubomír Bulej directly.

• Lecture slides (PDF)
• Lecture notes (PDF)
• Additional slides
  • Network Applications
  • Devices and Drivers
  • File Systems
  • Networking Applications
  • OS Security
  • SSH, Linux, make, C vs C++ recap

Resources

Books

Our primary course book is Arpaci-Dusseau et al.: Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (Version 1.00). If you need more information, there are other excellent books that can help you study. Favorites include:

• Anderson et al.: Operating Systems Principles and Practice
• Silberschatz et al.: Operating System Concepts
• Tanenbaum et al.: Modern Operating Systems

None of these books follows the course exactly, but all contain enough material to suffice as a learning material.

A good book on the computer systems background is Patterson et al.: Computer Organization and Design.

Manuals

• MIPS R4000 Processor Manuals
  • MIPS R4000 Microprocessor User’s Manual, 2nd edition, 1994
• Additional MIPS Processor Manuals (not necessarily limited to MIPS R4000)
  • MIPSpro Assembly Language Programmer’s Guide
  • MIPS32 4K Processor Core Family Software User’s Manual, 2001
  • System V Application Binary Interface, MIPS RISC Processor Supplement, 3rd Edition

MIPS Cross Compiler Toolchain

The cross-compiler toolchain (and MSIM too) is available in the Rotunda lab.

If you want to develop on your own machine, we recommend to use the precompiled packages for Fedora that are available via COPR.

dnf copr enable d3s/teaching
dnf install mff-nswi004-binutils-mipsel-linux-gnu mff-nswi004-gcc-mipsel-linux-gnu
dnf install mff-nswi004-gdb-mipsel-linux-gnu

For other distributions, we offer only a shell scripts to build the whole toolchain from scratch:

• toolchain-dynamic.sh (with dynamically linked binaries)
• toolchain-static.sh (with statically linked binaries)

We do not support Windows: if you want to develop in Windows, we recommend to install Fedora in VirtualBox and use file-sharing and PuTTy to compile in the VM but develop on Windows.

Note that GitLab runners that run tests on your solutions use Docker images based on Fedora with the following packages.

You can also compile/run your code inside Docker/Podman, using the same environment as in GitLab CI. If the following command is executed from your clone of a00, it runs both the basic and extended tests. Note that it mounts the current directory in read-write mode and thus object files and executables are stored alongside your source files.

podman run \
    --rm \
    --memory=256m --memory-swap=512m \
    --mount=type=bind,src=.,destination=/root/nswi004,ro=false,bind-propagation=shared \
    mffd3s/nswi004-base:latest \
    /bin/bash -c 'cd /root/nswi004; make distclean; make && make check check2'

MSIM MIPS R4000 Simulator

• Git repository
• Reference Manual
• Tutorial (incomplete)
• GNU/Linux
  • Fedora Copr: msim-git (dnf copr enable d3s/teaching && dnf install msim-git)
  • Arch Linux PKGBUILD: msim-1.3.8.5-1.aur, msim-git.aur

If you want to run MSIM on Windows or on other platform, you need to compile it from sources.