The following schedule is tentative and subject to change without notice.

Credit: Most of slides for this lecture are based on materials provided by the authors of the textbook and references.

For project submission and automatic grading, we are running a dedicated server at https://sys.snu.ac.kr. If you want to access the sys server outside of the SNU campus, please send a request via a Google Form whose URL is posted in the eTL.

Project #5: FATty File System

Microsoft’s early FAT file system has a unique file index structure based on the File Allocation Table (FAT). The goal of this project is to implement the “FATty” file system, which modifies the file index structure of the existing xv6 file system to resemble that of the FAT file system.

• Project specification available here
• Due date: 11:59PM, June 22 (Saturday).

Project #4: KSM (Kernel Samepage Merging)

KSM (Kernel Samepage Merging) is a memory de-duplication feature that enables the kernel to consolidate identical memory pages into a single shared page across multiple processes, thereby saving memory. The objective of this project is to explore the virtual memory subsystem of xv6 by implementing the KSM feature.

• Project specification available here
• Due date: 11:59PM, May 26 (Sunday).

Project #3: The EDF (Earliest Deadline First) Scheduler

Currently, the CPU scheduler of xv6 uses a simple round-robin policy. The goal of this project is to understand the scheduling subsystem of xv6 by implementing the EDF (Earliest Deadline First) scheduler used in real-time systems.

• Project specification available here
• Due date: 11:59PM, April 28 (Sunday).

Project #2: System calls

System calls are the interfaces that allow user applications to request various services from the operating system kernel. This project aims to understand how those system calls are implemented in xv6.

• Project specification available here
• Due date: 11:59 PM, April 7 (Sunday).

Project #1: Hello world, xv6

xv6 is an instructional operating system developed by MIT based on Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie’s Unix version 6 (v6). In this course, we will use xv6-riscv, a version recently ported to a multi-core RISC-V machine. The goal of this project is to set up your development environment on Linux or macOS and familiarize yourself with our project submission server.

• Project specification available here
• Due date: 11:59 PM, March 18 (Monday).

xv6 Resources

• xv6 source code: https://github.com/snu-csl/xv6-riscv-snu (our customized version)
• xv6: a simple, Unix-like teaching operating system
• The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas
• RISC-V Instruction Set Manual Volume I: Unprivileged ISA, Version 20191213
• RISC-V Instruction Set Manual Volume II: Privileged Architecture, Version 20211203