1. Due Dates and Mark Distribution

Due Date: 8am (08:00), Fri April 11th (Week 6)

Marks: Worth 25 marks (of the 100 available for the class mark component of the course)

The 10% bonus for one week early applies.

2. Introduction

In this assignment you will solve a number of synchronisation and locking problems. You will also get experience with data structure and resource management issues.

Please complete the reading exercises for your week 4 tutorial.

Write Readable Code

In your programming assignments, you are expected to write well-documented, readable code. There are a variety of reasons to strive for clear and readable code. Code that is understandable to others is a requirement for any real-world programmer, not to mention the fact that after enough time, you will be in the shoes of one of the others when attempting to understand what you wrote in the past. Your partner will also be highly appreciative of readable code. Finally, clear, concise, well-commented code makes it easier for the assignment marker to award you marks! (This is especially important if you can't get the assignment running. If you can't figure out what is going on, how do you expect us to).

There is no single right way to organise and document your code. It is not our intent to dictate a particular coding style for this class. The best way to learn about writing readable code is to read other people's code, for example OS/161. When you read someone else's code, note what you like and what you don't like. Pay close attention to the lines of comments which most clearly and efficiently explain what is going on. When you write code yourself, keep these observations in mind.

Here are some general tips for writing better code:

• Split large functions. If a function spans multiple pages, it is probably too long.
• Group related items together, whether they are variable declarations, lines of code, or functions.
• Use descriptive names for variables and procedures. Be consistent with this throughout the program.
• Comments should describe the programmer's intent, not the actual mechanics of the code. A comment which says "Find a free disk block" is much more informative than one that says "Find first non-zero element of array."

3. Setting Up

Don't forget to setup your environment by running:

% 3231

Your group account

You will do Assignment 1 as part of a two-person group. If you are not yet in a group, post to the appropriate message board on the cs3231 forum to find a partner. You must nominate your partner, and they must nominate you, via the group nomination form (under "Administration" on the left-hand side).

You will be notified by email when your group is created, which usually happens 24–48 hours after the partners have nominated each other. Check the group nomination page for your group number. A group account will have been created for you in /home/osprjXXX, where XXX is your three-digit group number. For example, if you are a member of group 103, your group account is /home/osprj103.

Set up your group account

For assignment 0, you used the Subversion (SVN) revision control system to keep track of changes and to produce a file that you could submit. For this assignment, you will also use SVN. However, you have to do some extra set-up because you will be collaborating with another person on the assignment.

Before you start, both you and your partner will need to modify your umask so you and your partner to share the assignment files (if you're interested, see man umask for details). Do this by modifying your .profile in your home directory. Change the umask command to be the following:

% umask 007

Now, whenever you log in, your umask will be set appropriately. Either log out and log back in again now or run the command source .profile to ensure your umask is set.

Obtain the assignment sources

Only one group member should do the following.

For this assignment, you will set up an SVN repository in your group account directory (/home/osprjXXX). You may remember the repo directory you created for assignment 0. For assignment 1, you will be creating this repository in your group account directory. Initialise this repository now:

% cd /home/osprjXXX
% svnadmin create repo

Once again, this repository directory will be completely maintained for you by SVN. Now import the sources into your new repository in a similar way to assignment 0:

% cd /home/cs3231/assigns
% svn import asst1/src file:///home/osprjXXX/repo/asst1/trunk -m "Initial import"

Now make an immediate branch of this import for easy reference when generating your diff:

% svn copy -m "Tag initial import" file:///home/osprjXXX/repo/asst1/trunk file:///home/osprjXXX/repo/asst1/initial

Checkout

The following instructions are now for both partners.

You and your partner should now check out a working copy:

% cd ~/cs3231
% svn checkout file:///home/osprjXXX/repo/asst1/trunk asst1-src

You are now ready to start the assignment.

4. Begin Your Assignment

Configure OS/161 for Assignment 1

Before proceeding further, configure your new sources.

% cd ~/cs3231/asst1-src
% ./configure

If you need to re-install the user-level utilities, do the following:

% bmake
% bmake install

We have provided you with a framework to run your solutions for ASST1. This framework consists of driver code (found in kern/asst1) and menu items you can use to execute your solutions from the OS/161 kernel boot menu.

You have to reconfigure your kernel before you can use this framework. The procedure for configuring a kernel is the same as in ASST0, except you will use the ASST1 configuration file:

% cd ~/cs3231/asst1-src/kern/conf
% ./config ASST1

Building for ASST1

% cd ../compile/ASST1
% bmake depend
% bmake
% bmake install

% cd ~/cs3231/root
% sys161 kernel 
sys161: System/161 release 1.99.04, compiled Mar  6 2010 15:32:32

OS/161 base system version 1.99.05
Copyright (c) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009
   President and Fellows of Harvard College.  All rights reserved.

Put-your-group-name-here's system version 0 (ASST1 #3)

1852k physical memory available
Device probe...
lamebus0 (system main bus)
emu0 at lamebus0
ltrace0 at lamebus0
ltimer0 at lamebus0
beep0 at ltimer0
rtclock0 at ltimer0
lrandom0 at lamebus0
random0 at lrandom0
lser0 at lamebus0
con0 at lser0

cpu0: MIPS r3000
OS/161 kernel [? for menu]: 

Command Line Arguments to OS/161

IMPORTANT: Please DO NOT change these menu option strings!

Here are some examples of using command line args to select OS/161 menu items:

sys161 kernel "at;bt;q"

sys161 kernel "q"

"Physical" Memory

In order to execute the tests in this assignment, you will need more than the 512 KiB of memory configured into System/161 by default. We suggest that you allocate at least 2 MiB of RAM to System/161. This configuration option is passed to the mainboard device with the ramsize parameter in your ~/cs3231/root/sys161.conf file. Make sure the mainboard device line looks like the following:

31 mainboard ramsize=2097152 cpus=1

5. Concurrent Programming with OS/161

If your code is properly synchronised, the timing of context switches and the order in which threads run should not change the behaviour of your solution. Of course, your threads may print messages in different orders, but you should be able to easily verify that they follow all of the constraints applied to them and that they do not deadlock.

Built-in thread tests

When you booted OS/161 in ASST0, you may have seen the options to run the thread tests. The thread test code uses the semaphore synchronisation primitive. You should trace the execution of one of these thread tests in GDB to see how the scheduler acts, how threads are created, and what exactly happens in a context switch. You should be able to step through a call to thread_switch() and see exactly where the current thread changes.

Thread test 1 (tt1 at the prompt or on the kernel command line) prints the numbers 0 through 7 each time each thread loops. Thread test 2 (tt2) prints only when each thread starts and exits. The latter is intended to show that the scheduler doesn't cause starvation—the threads should all start together, spin for awhile, and then end together.

Debugging concurrent programs

thread_yield() is automatically called for you at intervals that vary randomly. While this randomness is fairly close to reality, it complicates the process of debugging your concurrent programs.

The random number generator used to vary the time between these thread_yield() calls uses the same seed as the random device in System/161. This means that you can reproduce a specific execution sequence by using a fixed seed for the random number generator. You can pass an explicit seed into random device by editing the "random" line in your sys161.conf file. For example, to set the seed to 1, you would edit the line to look like:

	28 random seed=1 

We recommend that while you are writing and debugging your solutions you pick a seed and use it consistently. Once you are confident that your threads do what they are supposed to do, set the random device to autoseed. This should allow you to test your solutions under varying conditions and may expose scenarios that you had not anticipated.

To reproduce your test cases, you additionally need to run your tests via command line args to sys161 as described above. This avoids non-determinism introduced by the arbitrary typing delay associated with using the interactive command menu.

6. Tutorial Exercises

Code reading

The following questions aim to guide you through OS/161's implementation of threads and synchronisation primitives in the kernel itself for those interested in a deeper understanding of OS/161. A deeper understanding can be useful when debugging, but is not strictly required. However, the main aim of the tutorial is to have you implement synchronised data structures using the supplied OS synchronisation primitives. As such the main focus of the tutorial will be on the Synchronisation Problems below.

Be prepared to discuss them in your tutorial in week 4.

To implement synchronisation primitives, you will have to understand the operation of the threading system in OS/161. It may also help you to look at the provided implementation of semaphores. When you are writing solution code for the synchronisation problems it will help if you also understand exactly what the OS/161 scheduler does when it dispatches among threads.

Thread Questions

1. What happens to a thread when it exits (i.e., calls thread_exit())? What about when it sleeps?
2. What function(s) handle(s) a context switch?
3. How many thread states are there? What are they?
4. What does it mean to turn interrupts off? How is this accomplished? Why is it important to turn off interrupts in the thread subsystem code?
5. What happens when a thread wakes up another thread? How does a sleeping thread get to run again?

Scheduler Questions

Synchronisation Questions

Synchronisation Problems

The following problems are designed to familiarise you with some of the problems that arise in concurrent programming and help you learn to identify and solve them.

Identify Deadlocks

semaphore *mutex, *data;
 
void me() {
	P(mutex);
	/* do something */
	
	P(data);
	/* do something else */
	
	V(mutex);
	
	/* clean up */
	V(data);
}
 
void you() {
	P(data)
	P(mutex);
	
	/* do something */
	
	V(data);
	V(mutex);
}

More Deadlock Identification

lock *file1, *file2, *mutex;
 
void laurel() {
	lock_acquire(mutex);
	/* do something */
	
	lock_acquire(file1);
    	/* write to file 1 */
 
	lock_acquire(file2);
	/* write to file 2 */
 
	lock_release(file1);
	lock_release(mutex);
 
	/* do something */
	
	lock_acquire(file1);
 
	/* read from file 1 */
	/* write to file 2 */
 
	lock_release(file2);
	lock_release(file1);
}
 
void hardy() {
    	/* do stuff */
	
	lock_acquire(file1);
	/* read from file 1 */
 
	lock_acquire(file2);
	/* write to file 2 */
	
	lock_release(file1);
	lock_release(file2);
 
	lock_acquire(mutex);
	/* do something */
	lock_acquire(file1);
	/* write to file 1 */
	lock_release(file1);
	lock_release(mutex);
}

Synchronised Lists

Make sure you clearly state your assumptions about the constraints on access to such a structure and how you ensure that these constraints are respected.

7. Coding Assignment

We know: you've been itching to get to the coding. Well, you've finally arrived!

This is the assessable component of this assignment.

The following problems will give you the opportunity to write some fairly straightforward concurrent programs and get a more detailed understanding of how to use concurrency mechanisms to solve problems. We have provided you with basic driver code that starts a predefined number of threads that execute a predefined activity (in the form of calling functions that you must implement or modify).

Remember to specify a seed to use in the random number generator by editing your sys161.conf file, and run your tests using Sys/161 command line args. It is much easier to debug initial problems when the sequence of execution and context switches is reproducible.

For the first problem, we ask you to solve a very simple mutual exclusion problem. The code in kern/asst1/math.c counts from 0 to 10000 by starting several threads that increment a common counter.

You will notice that as supplied, the code operates incorrectly and produces results like 345 + 1 = 352.

Once the count of 10000 is reached, each thread signals the main thread that it is finished and then exits. Once all adder() threads exit, the main (math()) thread cleans up and exits.

Your Job

Your job is to modify math.c by placing synchronisation primitives appropriately such that incrementing the counter works correctly. The statistics printed should also be consistent with the overall count.

Note that the number of increments each thread performs is dependent on scheduling and hence will vary. However, the total should equal the final count.

To test your solution, use the "1a" menu choice. Sample output from a correct solution in included below.

% sys161 kernel "1a;q"
sys161: System/161 release 1.99.04, compiled Mar  6 2010 15:32:32

OS/161 base system version 1.99.05
Copyright (c) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009
   President and Fellows of Harvard College.  All rights reserved.

Put-your-group-name-here's system version 0 (ASST1 #4)

1852k physical memory available
Device probe...
lamebus0 (system main bus)
emu0 at lamebus0
ltrace0 at lamebus0
ltimer0 at lamebus0
beep0 at ltimer0
rtclock0 at ltimer0
lrandom0 at lamebus0
random0 at lrandom0
lser0 at lamebus0
con0 at lser0

cpu0: MIPS r3000
OS/161 kernel: 1a
Starting 10 adder threads
Adder threads performed 10000 adds
Adder 0 performed 1070 increments.
Adder 1 performed 989 increments.
Adder 2 performed 972 increments.
Adder 3 performed 995 increments.
Adder 4 performed 953 increments.
Adder 5 performed 976 increments.
Adder 6 performed 1039 increments.
Adder 7 performed 989 increments.
Adder 8 performed 1030 increments.
Adder 9 performed 987 increments.
The adders performed 10000 increments overall
Operation took 1.920208600 seconds
OS/161 kernel: q
Shutting down.
The system is halted.

Part 2: Bounded-buffer producer/consumer problem

Your second task in this assignment is to implement a solution to a standard producer/consumer problem. In the producer/consumer problem one or more producer threads put data into a fixed-sized buffer while one or more consumer threads process information from the same buffer.

The code in kern/asst1/producerconsumer_driver.c starts up a number of producer and consumer threads. The producer threads attempt to communicate with the consumer threads by calling the producer_produce() function with a data structure. In turn, the consumer threads attempt to receive information from the producer threads by calling consumer_consume(). Unfortunately, these functions are currently unimplemented. Your job is to implement them.

Here's what you will see before you have implemented any code:

OS/161 kernel [? for menu]: 1b
run_producerconsumer: starting up
Waiting for producer threads to exit...
Consumer started
Consumer started
Producer started
Producer started
Producer finished
Consumer started
Producer finished
Consumer started
Consumer started
All producer threads have exited.
*** Error! Consumer bored, exiting...
*** Error! Consumer bored, exiting...
*** Error! Consumer bored, exiting...
*** Error! Consumer bored, exiting...
*** Error! Consumer bored, exiting...
Operation took 0.402660000 seconds
OS/161 kernel [? for menu]: 

And here's what you will see with a (possibly partially) correct solution:

OS/161 kernel [? for menu]: 1b
run_producerconsumer: starting up
Consumer started
Consumer started
Consumer started
Waiting for producer threads to exit...
Producer started
Consumer started
Producer started
Producer finished
Consumer started
Producer finished
All producer threads have exited.
Consumer finished normally
Consumer finished normally
Consumer finished normally
Consumer finished normally
Consumer finished normally
Operation took 0.232509280 seconds
OS/161 kernel [? for menu]: 

The files:

• producerconsumer_driver.c: Starts the producer/consumer simulation by creating appropriate producer and consumer threads that will call producer_produce() and consumer_consume(). You are welcome to (in fact, you are encouraged to) modify this simulation when testing your implementation, but remember that it will be overwritten with a standard copy when your solution is tested.
• producerconsumer_driver.h: Contains prototypes for the functions in producerconsumer.c, as well as the description of the data structure that is passed from producer to consumer (uninterestingly named pc_data). This file will also be overwritten when your solution is tested.
• producerconsumer.c: Contains your implementation of producer_produce() and consumer_consume(). It also contains the functions producerconsumer_startup() and producerconsumer_shutdown(), which you can implement to initialise your data structure and any synchronisation primitives you may need.

How to implement your solution

You must implement a data structure representing a buffer capable of holding at least BUFFER_SIZE struct pc_data items. This means that calling producer_produce() BUFFER_SIZE times should not block (or overwrite existing items, of course), but calling producer_produce one more time should block, until data has been removed from the buffer using consumer_consume(). A simple way to implement this data structure is to use an array, though you will of course have to use appropriate synchronisation primitives to ensure that concurrent access is handled safely.

You're in the middle of renovating your apartment and need to purchase some paint. You arrive at your local paint shop to find the shop in complete chaos. Customers are receiving empty cans of paint or paint with weird colours, the staff are fighting over the various tints used to colour the paint, orders are getting lost, cans of paint mixed up, some customers are waiting forever for their can of paint, while others seems to get all the service.

Being an operating system expert, you quickly realise that the shop's problems are related to concurrency issues between the customers and shop staff. You volunteer your services to provide a solution to the shop's problems, reduce the chaos, and restore order to the store.

The Basic Paint Shop

To provide a solution, you must come to terms with the basic elements of the paint shop that you have to work with. The shop consists of a set of tints (such as RED, GREEN, BLUE) used to colour paint. They are mixed with paint by shop staff in various ways according to customer requests.

Customers bring their own empty paint can, record the tints they require on the can itself, and give the can to shop staff to mix the paint. The basic elements are defined in kern/asst1/paintshop_driver.h. The actions of customers and shop staff are defined in kern/asst1/paintshop_driver.c. See the file for detailed comments.

• Customers arrive with their paint can, write their requested colour on the can in terms of tints, submit their can as an order to the paint shop staff and wait.

  Eventually their can returns with the requested contents (exactly as requested), they paint until the can is empty, take a short break, and do it all again until they have emptied the desired number of cans, then they go home.

• Shop Staff are only slightly more complicated than the customers. They take orders, and if valid (not NULL), they fill them and serve them. When all the customers have left, the staff go home.

  An NULL order signals that the staff member should go home.

• It initialises all the tint containers to have served zero doses.
• It calls paintshop_open(), a routine you will provide to set up the shop.
• It then creates some threads to run as shop staff, and some more threads to run as customers. Note these threads obviously run concurrently.
• The driver thread then waits on a semaphore for all the staff and customers to finish, after which we print out the tint statistics for the day.
• Finally, it calls paintshop_close(), a procedure you provide to clean up when the shop has closed.

You can assume that all the tint containers in the shop are infinite in size and hence will never be empty.

Have a quick look through both paintshop_driver.c and paintshop_driver.h to reinforce your understanding of what is going on (well, at least what is expected to go on).

Your Job

Your job is to write the functions outlined in paintshop.c (and potentially modify paintshop.h) that perform most of the work. Each function is described in paintshop.c.

Generally, your solution must result in the following when runpaintshop() is called during testing.

• The shop being prepared for opening.
• All customers having their orders served with the correctly tinted paint in a can. "Correct" means that each corresponding entry in the contents array contains what was originally requested in the requested_colours array.
• The shop staff all going home after all the customers are finished.
• The shop being suitably cleaned up afterwards (allocated memory or locks, semaphores, etc being freed).
• Statistics kept on tint usage are consistent with the orders made.

You can modify paintshop_driver.c and paintshop_driver.h to test different scenarios (e.g vary the number and colour of paint cans ordered), but your solution must also work with an unmodified version of the paintshop_driver.c file.

You will have to modify paintshop.c to implement your solution. However, your modifications have the constraint that they must still work with an original paintshop_driver.c.

For testing, we will replace paintshop_driver.c and .h with logically equivalent versions that may vary the numbers of participants, and the colours requested. We may also vary the timing of various functions. A correct solution will work for all variations we test. Sample output from a correct solution is included below.

% sys161 kernel "1c;q"
sys161: System/161 release 1.99.04, compiled Mar  6 2010 15:32:32

OS/161 base system version 1.99.05
Copyright (c) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009
   President and Fellows of Harvard College.  All rights reserved.

Put-your-group-name-here's system version 0 (ASST1 #3)

1844k physical memory available
Device probe...
lamebus0 (system main bus)
emu0 at lamebus0
ltrace0 at lamebus0
ltimer0 at lamebus0
beep0 at ltimer0
rtclock0 at ltimer0
lrandom0 at lamebus0
random0 at lrandom0
lser0 at lamebus0
con0 at lser0

cpu0: MIPS r3000
OS/161 kernel: 1c
S 2 going home after mixing 36 orders
S 1 going home after mixing 37 orders
S 0 going home after mixing 27 orders
Tint 1 used for 0 doses
Tint 2 used for 0 doses
Tint 3 used for 0 doses
Tint 4 used for 0 doses
Tint 5 used for 0 doses
Tint 6 used for 0 doses
Tint 7 used for 0 doses
Tint 8 used for 100 doses
Tint 9 used for 0 doses
Tint 10 used for 0 doses
The paint shop is closed, bye!!!
Operation took 0.394703080 seconds
OS/161 kernel: q
Shutting down.
The system is halted.

Before Coding!!!!

The following questions may help you develop your solution.

• What are the shared resources (e.g. tint containers)?
• Who shares what resources?
• Who produces what and who consumes what (e.g. customers produce orders consumed by staff)?
• What states can the various resources be in?
• What do you need to keep a count of (e.g. number of customers in the shop)?
• How does your solution prevent deadlock or starvation?

Try to frame the problem in terms of resources requiring concurrency control, and producer-consumer problems. A diagram may help you to understand the problem.

It is reasonable to assume co-operative subsystems within an OS. It is difficult (impossible) to defend against malicious code within the operating system itself. However, one can still program defensively in the interests of detecting invalid behaviour early for debugging purposes. Such behaviour usually signals an internal error, with a reasonable response being to panic(). In the case of this assignment, one can assume customers and staff follow the protocol.

Evaluating your solutions

Performance will be judged in at least the following areas.

• Do all the staff members participate?
• Can staff mix in parallel if they do not require the same tints?
• Do you define critical sections larger than needed?

Documenting your solutions

This is a compulsory component of this assignment. You must write a small design document identifying the basic issues in all of the concurrency problems in this assignment, and then describe your solution to the problems you have identified. For example, detail which data structures are shared, and what code forms a critical section. The document must be plain ASCII text. We expect such a document to be roughly 200–1000 words, i.e. clear and to the point.

The document will be used to guide our markers in their evaluation of your solution to the assignment. In the case of a poor results in the functional testing combined with a poor design document, we will base our assessment on these components alone. If you can't describe your own solution clearly, you can't expect us to reverse engineer the code to a poor and complex solution to the assignment.

Place your design document in design.txt (which we have created for you) at the top of the source tree to OS/161 (i.e. in ~/cs3231/asst1-src/design.txt).

Also, please word wrap you design doc if your have not already done so. You can use the unix fmt command to achieve this if your editor cannot.

8. Generating Your Assignment Submission

As with assignment 0, you again will be submitting a diff of your changes to the original tree.

You should first commit your changes back to the repository using the following command. Note: You will have to supply a comment on your changes. You also need to coordinate with your partner that the changes you have (or potentially both have) made are committed consistently by you and your partner, such that the repository contains the work you want from both partners.

% cd ~/cs3231/asst1-src
% svn commit

Once your solution is committed, generate a diff.

% cd ~
% svn diff file:///home/osprjXXX/repo/asst1/initial file:///home/osprjXXX/repo/asst1/trunk >~/asst1.diff

Testing Your Submission