![[UNSW]](/~cs3231/images/unsw_0.png)
The OS/161 System
Background
OS/161 is an educational operating system developed by the Systems Research at Harvard group, at Harvard University. It aims to strike a balance between giving students experience working on a real operating system, and potentially overwhelming students with the complexity that exists in a fully fledged operating system, such as Linux. Compared to most deployed operating systems, OS/161 is quite small (approximately 20,000 lines of code), and therefore it is much easier to develop an understanding of the entire code base.The complete OS/161 environment consists of three major parts:
- OS/161 itself;
- System/161, the simulated machine that OS/161 runs on;
- development tools required to compile and debug code for the simulated machine.
In your assignments, you will be working exclusively on the OS/161 operating-system source code.
System/161 and the development tools are already installed on CSE machines — you will not need to modify nor understand their source code.
OS/161
The OS/161 source code distribution contains a full operating system source tree, including the kernel, libraries, various utilities (ls, cat, etc.), and some test programs. OS/161 boots on the simulated machine in the same manner as a real system might boot on real hardware.
The assignment specifications will contain instructions on how to get a copy of the sources for each particular assignment.
System/161
System/161 simulates a "real" machine to run OS/161 on. The machine features a MIPS R2000/R3000 CPU including an MMU, but no floating point unit or cache. The number of CPUs available in the machine is configurable, but we will only be using a uniprocessor configuration at UNSW. It also features simplified hardware devices hooked up to lamebus. These devices are much simpler than real hardware, and thus make it feasible for you to get your hands dirty, without having to deal with the typical level of complexity of physical hardware.
Using a simulator has several advantages. Unlike software you have written thus far, buggy software may result in completely locking up the machine, making to difficult to debug and requiring a reboot. A simulator allows debuggers access to the machine below the software architecture level as if debugging was built into the CPU chip. In some senses, the simulator is similar to an in circuit emulator (ICE) that you might find in industry, only it's done in software. The other major advantage is speed of reboot. Rebooting real hardware takes minutes, and hence the development cycle can be frustratingly slow on real hardware.
Development tools
The OS/161 environment uses modified versions of the usual GNU development tools (compiler, linker, etc.), named with the os161- prefix: os161-gcc, os161-gdb, os161-ld, etc. The OS/161 build system hides most of the complexity of using these tools directly. However, you will still need to learn to use GDB.
You should already be familiar the GDB, the GNU debugger. GDB allows you to set breakpoints to stop your program under certain conditions, inspect the state of your program when it stops, modify its state, and continue where it left off. It is a powerful aid to the debugging process that is worth investing the time needed to learn it. GDB allows you to quickly find bugs that are very difficult to find with the typical printf style debugging.
Our GDB tutorial is a brief and focused introduction to using GDB with OS/161.
Details beyond the level you need to know can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/gdb.html.
Working from home
See the wiki for instructions for installing System/161 and the development toolchain on non-CSE machines. Feel free to build and install them at home. However, while we make every endeavour to ensure the tools build and function for you, we cannot be responsible for them working (or not) on your machine.