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Seminar: Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition

The Information and Communication Systems Seminar for FS 2010 will review the source code of the 6th Edition of Unix following Lions' commentary as a guide.

Course Description

The purpose of the seminar is to get a unique insight in the internals of an operating system and low level system programming practice. Although the version of UNIX to be covered is obsolete, most of the aspects of the kernel are still valid today. The older version of the code will make it easier to get a complete picture of a real operating system and allow students to follow Lions' commentary that illustrates both how the system works as well as the way it has been programmed.

The source code can be found at: http://v6.cuzuco.com/.

Lions' commentary can be found at: http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/book.pdf or acquired in printed form (ISBN 978-1573980135).

Course Organization

See the introductory lecture slides containing general details of the course structure.

Time and location

The seminar will be held in CHN G 46 (not CAB as for the first meeting), from 3pm - 7pm, on the following three dates:

Tuesday 23rd March
Tuesday 20th April
Tuesday 11th May

Topic allocation

NB: the topics have changed slightly from the list given in the course overview; a number of shorter topics were merged.

Tuesday 23rd March:

Getting started (chapter 6): Simon Gerber slides
Processes (chapter 7): Noah Heusser slides
Process management (chapter 8): Jana Giceva slides
Hardware interrupts and traps, the assembler trap routine, clock interrupts (chapters 9-11): Reto Mock slides
Traps and system calls (chapter 12): Kaveh Razavi slides

Tuesday 20th April:

Software interrupts (chapter 13): David Flatz
Program swapping (chapter 14): Urs Fässler slides
Introduction to basic I/O and the RK disk driver (chapters 15-16): Max Urech slides
Buffer manipulation (chapter 17): Stefan Schmid slides
File access and control (chapter 18): Mike Godenzi slides