CS170 Lab 1: Setup and C review, WeensyOS MiniprocOS, git

Lab 1: Setup and C review, WeensyOS MiniprocOS, git

Introduction

This lab is split into three parts. In the first part, you will get your development environment set up, and quickly review C pointers. In the second part, you will do the heart of this lab: a small coding exercise (WeensyOS, written by Eddie Kohler) in which you manipulate processes (you will implement a basic fork call!). The third part gives an introduction to Git, a version control system that you will use this semester to manage your work.

This lab does not require you to write much code. So take time to understand the code, tools, and environment that you have been given; you will need to be fluent in these things in order to be productive this semester.

You will electronically hand in code and answers (the mechanics are described at the end of the lab; sneak preview). You will hand in responses to numbered exercises. Do your work in the code files themselves and in a file called answers.txt (your answers must be in this file in text; a blank answers.txt will receive no credit).

Please note the following expectation, which we will have throughout the semester. You must comment every block of code that you write, and you will be graded on these comments. As a rough guideline, figure that you need a one-sentence comment every four lines or so. In these comments, you must explain the purpose of the code, rather than narrating the instruction that you gave to the computer. Examples of not-good comments are, "assign variable X to variable Y", "dereference pointer P", or "the following code is a for loop that iterates over the foo structure." An example of a better comment would be, "Initialize the frobnitz data structure." To be clear: in the real world, it is terrible style to comment code that is obvious or self-documenting. Why are we departing from that? Because, this being a class, we want to make sure that you understand and can explain your code.

As an exception, the preceding expectation does not apply to the exercises in part 1 below.

Part 1: Getting started, C review

Set up your development environment

Go to the setup page, and follow the instructions there. Come back here when that step is complete.

Get the code

The files that you will need for this and subsequent lab assignments in this course are distributed using the Git version control system. We will learn a bit more about Git at the end of this lab.

The URL for the course Git repository is https://github.com/trinabh/cs170-labs.git

To get the labs, go into your development environment (the devbox or the CSIL machines) and run the commands below (the lines preceded with '#' are comments):

$ mkdir ~/cs170
$ cd ~/cs170
# You must execute the line below; NOT doing so violates the course policies
$ chmod 0700 . 
# The 'dot' at the end of the next line tells git not to add another 
# layer in the directory hierarchy: the clone will be into the current directory
$ git clone https://github.com/trinabh/cs170-labs.git . 
Cloning into ....
$ 

Git allows you to keep track of the changes you make to the code. For example, if you are finished with one of the exercises, and want to checkpoint your progress, you can commit your changes by running:

$ git commit -am 'my solution for lab1 exercise1'
Created commit 60d2135: my solution for lab1 exercise1
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
$ 

You can keep track of your changes by using the git diff command. Running git diff will display the changes to your code since your last commit, and git diff origin/lab1 will display the changes relative to the initial code supplied for this lab. Here, origin/lab1 is the name of the git branch with the initial code you downloaded from our server for this assignment.

Review of C pointers

All of the projects in this class will be done in C or C++, for two main reasons. First, some of the things that we want to implement require direct manipulation of hardware state and memory, which are operations that are naturally expressed in C. Second, C and C++ are widely used languages, so learning them is a useful thing to do in its own right. While you have some experience in C from prior courses (CS32, or CS154 perhaps), you will probably need greater comfort and familiarity here than was required there. You will truly need to "think in C."

If you are interested in why C looks like it does, we encourage you to look at Ritchie's history. Here, perhaps, is the key quotation: "Despite some aspects mysterious to the beginner and occasionally even to the adept, C remains a simple and small language, translatable with simple and small compilers. Its types and operations are well-grounded in those provided by real machines, and for people used to how computers work, learning the idioms for generating time- and space-efficient programs is not difficult. At the same time the language is sufficiently abstracted from machine details that program portability can be achieved."

You will do four short exercises in C, as a warmup. From your cs170 directory:

$ cd lab1/review-pointers

Exercise 1. Implement the function set_to_five in ex1.c.

For Exercises 1 through 4, you can test with:

$ make

$ ./build/ex1
ex1: OK

Exercise 2. Implement the function swap in ex2.c.

You will need to remove the assert(0); line. Remove this wherever you see it as you implement functions in future exercises; it is a reminder that you have yet to implement a particular function.

As above, you compile and test with:

$ make

$ ./build/ex2
ex2: OK

The assert line you saw in the previous exercise is a simple application of a powerful tool. In C, an assert is a preprocessor macro which effectively enforces a contract in the program. (You can read more about macros in C here.) The contract that assert enforces is simple: when program execution reaches assert(<condition>), if condition is true, execution continues; otherwise, the program aborts with an error message.

Assertions, when used properly, are powerful because they allow the programmer who uses them to guarantee that certain assumptions about his or her code hold. For example, in the swap function that you just implemented, there are two assertions at the beginning of the function, before where your code should have been placed:

void
swap(int *p1, int *p2)
{
        assert(p1 != NULL);
        assert(p2 != NULL);

	...
}

Exercise 3. Implement the function array_sum in ex3.c.

Test it:

$ make
gcc -m32 -g -c ex3.c -o build/ex3.o
gcc -m32 static/part3_harness.o build/ex3.o -lm -o build/ex3
$ ./build/ex3
ex3: OK

Again, you should see "OK".

Test it:

$ make
gcc -m32 -g -c ex4.c -o build/ex4.o
gcc -m32 static/part4_harness.o build/ex4.o -lm -o build/ex4
$ ./build/ex4
set_point ok
point_dist ok

Part 2: WeensyOS assignment: MiniprocOS

The heart of this lab is the first WeensyOS. WeensyOS refers to a series of small coding assignments that are also complete operating systems. You could boot a WeensyOS operating system on real x86-compatible hardware! The purpose of the WeensyOS assignments is first, to teach some of the class's concepts through example, and second, to demystify operating systems in general.

WeensyOS was developed by Eddie Kohler; the code that we use, and the description below (narrative, exercises, etc.), is borrowed from him. One of his goals in developing these labs was to make them fun. We think he succeeded!

The first WeensyOS problem set is called MiniprocOS, and it concerns processes. MiniprocOS is a tiny operating system that supports the major process primitives: creating a new process with fork, exiting a process, and waiting on a process that has exited. The only thing missing -- and it's a big one -- is process isolation: MiniprocOS processes actually share a single address space. (In a later WeensyOS assignment you will implement process isolation for memory.) In this assignment, you will actually implement the code that forks a new process, and see how system calls are implemented. You will also update the code that waits on an exited process to avoid busy waiting.

x86 emulator and other tools

You could take the disk image file built in this assignment, write it to your laptop's hard drive, and boot up your operating system directly if you wanted! However, it's much easier to work with a virtual machine or PC emulator.

An emulator mimics, or emulates, the behavior of a full hardware platform. A PC emulator acts like a Pentium-class PC: it emulates the execution of Intel x86 instructions and the behavior of other PC hardware. For example, it can treat a normal file in your home directory as an emulated hard disk; when the program inside the emulator reads a sector from the disk, the emulator simply reads 512 bytes from the file. PC emulators are slower than real hardware, since they do all of the regular CPU's job in software -- not to mention the disk controller's job, the console's job, and so forth. However, debugging with an emulator is a whole lot friendlier, and you can't screw up your machine!

We will be using the QEMU emulator. We will also be using a C compiler (gcc), configured to compile code for an x86 ELF target. (ELF, or Executable and Linkable Format, is a particular format for storing machine language programs on disk.) All of the required tools are installed on our two lab platforms (the virtual devbox or the CSIL machines), which you set up above.

Note that if you are using the virtual devbox option, then you are using an additional layer of emulation to run the devbox itself (in that Ubuntu Linux is made to "run" on your own laptop or desktop). You are probably using Virtual Box for this purpose. Note that Virtual Box is solving almost the same problem that QEMU is. This is explained further on our setup page.

Browsing MiniprocOS

You fetched the source at the beginning of the lab. Look over the source:

# this assumes we were in the review-pointers directory
$ cd ..
# now we are in the lab1 directory

$ ls lab1
answers.txt  conf       GNUmakefile  k-loader.c  mergedep.pl      process.h        x86.c
boot.c       const.h    kernel.c     lib.c       p-procos-app2.c  review-pointers  x86.h
bootstart.S  COPYRIGHT  kernel.h     lib.h       p-procos-app3.c  submit.py
build        elf.h      k-int.S      link        p-procos-app.c   types.h
$

Change into the lab1 directory and run the make program (which must be GNU make).

make, if you haven't heard of it, is a program that simplifies the process of building software projects. The user writes a set of rules, called a Makefile (ours is called GNUmakefile) that tells the make program what to build. For example, a Makefile might say, "to compile a C program, run the gcc compiler; and by the way, I want to compile the program named hello, which depends on the C source file hello.c". Makefiles can be quite simple, although most medium-to-large projects have complex Makefiles. You'll be invoking a couple of Makefiles in the labs.

The WeensyOS GNUmakefile builds a hard disk image called procos.img, which contains the MiniprocOS "kernel" and two applications, p-procos-app.c and p-procos-app2.c.

Make's output should look something like this:

$ make
  HOSTCOMPILE build/mkbootdisk.c
  ASSEMBLE bootstart.S
  COMPILE boot.c
  LINK obj/bootsector
  ASSEMBLE k-int.S
  COMPILE kernel.c
  COMPILE x86.c
  COMPILE k-loader.c
  COMPILE lib.c
  COMPILE p-procos-app2.c
  LINK obj/p-procos-app2
  COMPILE p-procos-app3.c
  LINK obj/p-procos-app3
  COMPILE p-procos-app.c
  LINK obj/p-procos-app
  LINK obj/kernel
  CREATE procos.img
$

Now that you've built the OS disk image, it's time to run it! We've made it very easy to boot a given disk image; just run this command:

$ make run

This will start up QEMU. After a moment you should see a window like this!

Hit "1" to try to run the first application, and you should see a window like this:

To quit QEMU, type control-C in the terminal.

MiniprocOS Application

You're now ready to start learning about the OS code!

Start first with the application, p-procos-app.c. This application simply starts a single child process and waits for it to exit. It uses system calls that we covered in the lecture: fork starts a new process; exit exits a process; and wait returns a process's exit status.

Read and understand the code in p-procos-app.c.

How are those system calls implemented? As we reviewed in the lectures: to make a system call, the application program executes a trap: an instruction that initiates a protected control transfer to the kernel. The system call's arguments are often stored in machine registers, and that's how MiniprocOS does it. Likewise, the system call's results are often returned in a machine register. On Intel 80386-compatible machines (colloquially called "x86es"), the interrupt instruction is called int, and registers have names like %eax, %ebx, and so forth. A special C language statement, called asm, can execute the interrupt instruction and connect register values with C-language variables.

Read and understand the comments in process.h. This file defines MiniprocOS's system calls. Also glance through the code, to see how system calls actually work!

The MiniprocOS kernel handles these system calls.

This kernel is different from conventional operating system kernels in several ways, mostly to keep the kernel as small as possible. For one thing, the kernel shares an address space with user applications, so that user applications could write over the kernel if they wanted to. This isn't very robust, since the kernel is not isolated from user faults, but for now it is easier to keep everything in the same address space. Another difference is that MiniprocOS implements cooperative multitasking, rather than preemptive multitasking. That is, processes give up control voluntarily, and if a process went into an infinite loop, the machine would entirely stop. In preemptive multitasking, the kernel can preempt an uncooperative process, which forces it to give up control. Preemptive multitasking is more robust than cooperative multitasking, meaning it's more resilient to errors, but it is slightly more complex. All modern PC-class operating systems use preemptive multitasking for user-level applications, but the kernel itself usually switches between internal tasks using cooperative multitasking.

MiniprocOS's main kernel structures are as follows.

struct process_t

This is the process descriptor structure, which stores all the relevant information for each process. It is defined in kernel.h.

process_t proc_array[];

This is an array of process descriptor structures, one for each possible process. MiniprocOS supports up to 15 concurrent processes, with process IDs 1 to 15. The process descriptor for process I is stored in proc_array[I]. Initially, only one of these processes is active, namely proc_array[1]. The proc_array[0] entry is never used.

process_t *current;

This points to the process descriptor for the currently running process.

The code in kernel.c sets up these structures. In particular, the start() function initializes all the process descriptors.

Read and understand the code and comments in kernel.h. Then read and understand the memory map in kernel.c, the picture at the top that explains how MiniprocOS's memory is laid out. Then look at start().

The code you'll be changing in MiniprocOS is the function that responds to system calls. This function is called interrupt().

Read and understand the code for interrupt() in kernel.c. Concentrate on the simplest system call, namely sys_getpid/INT_SYS_GETPID. Understand how the sys_getpid application function (in process.h) and the INT_SYS_GETPID clause in interrupt() (in kernel.c) interact.

Exercise 5. Answer the following question (in answers.txt): Say you replaced run(current) in the INT_SYS_GETPID clause with schedule(). The process that called sys_getpid() will eventually run again, picking up its execution as if sys_getpid() had returned directly. When it does run, will the sys_getpid() call have returned the correct value? Why or why not?

You may have noticed, though, that the sys_fork() system call isn't working! Your job is to write the code that actually creates a new process.

Exercise 6. Fill out the do_fork() and copy_stack() functions in kernel.c.

Congratulations, you've written code to create a process -- it's not that hard, no? (Our version is less than 20 lines of code.) Here's what you should see when you're done:

Now take a look at the code in p-procos-app.c that calls sys_wait(). Also look at the INT_SYS_WAIT implementation in kernel.c. The current system call design uses a polling approach: to wait for process 2 to exit, a process must call sys_wait(2) over and over again until process 2 exits and the sys_wait(2) system call returns a value different from WAIT_TRYAGAIN.

We'll see more about polling later in the semester, but for now, notice that polling approaches like this often reduce utilization. A process uses CPU time to call sys_wait(2) over and over again, leaving less CPU time for others. An alternative approach, which can improve utilization, is called blocking. A blocking implementation would put sys_wait(2)'s caller to sleep, then wake it up once process 2 had exited and a real exit status was available. The sleeping process doesn't use any CPU. A process that is asleep because the kernel is waiting for some event is called blocked.

To implement Exercise 7, you will probably want to add a field to the process descriptor structure. This field will indicate whether or not a process is waiting on another process. You will change INT_SYS_WAIT to add the calling process to this "wait queue", and INT_SYS_EXIT to wake any processes that were on the "wait queue". There are several ways to do this; describe how you did it in answers.txt.

To check your work, try changing the sys_wait() loop in p-procos-app.c to look like this:

		do {
			status = sys_wait(p);
			app_printf("W");
		} while (status == WAIT_TRYAGAIN);

A polling implementation of sys_wait would produce output like this:

You want it to produce output like this:

Cleaning Up Processes

Now try running the other MiniprocOS application. You should see something like this (different processes generally print their lines in different colors):

The MiniprocOS2 application, in p-procos-app2.c, tries to run 1024 child processes.

Read and understand p-procos-app2.c.

Unfortunately, your current kernel code doesn't seem able to run more than 15 total processes, ever! It looks like old, dead processes aren't being cleaned up, even after we call sys_wait() on them. This is what we call a bug.

Exercise 8. Find and fix this bug.

When you've completed this exercise, the application should count up to 1024, like this:

Your colors may differ, however, depending on how you implement sys_wait(). One common implementation strategy ends with several red lines in a row. If you see this in your code, try to figure out why!

This completes the WeensyOS portion of this lab. At this point, you should commit your work:

# see what files you changed
$ git status

# examine your changes
$ git diff

$ git commit -am "My solutions to lab1"

Your name and email address were configured automatically based
on your username and hostname. Please check that they are accurate.
You can suppress this message by setting them explicitly:

    git config --global user.name "Your Name"
    git config --global user.email you@example.com
...

$ git config --global user.name "<your_name>" 
$ git config --global user.email <your_email_address> 

Part 3: Using Git

This course will use Git to distribute code for all programming assignments. Git is a distributed (as opposed to centralized) version control system. If used correctly, it can be very useful for tracking your work, undoing mistakes, trying different approaches, etc.

Read Eddie Kohler's excellent introduction to git. Where this page mentions code.seas.harvard.edu, read that as cs.ucsb.edu (where you cloned from, above); where it mentions "the CS50 appliance", read that as our lab platform (the devbox or your CSIL account).

Note that life with git will be far easier at first if you use a graphical browser. Gitk is a good one. It is installed on devbox and may be install on the CSIL machines. Just type gitk while you are in a git repo (if you haven't heard the term "repo" before, it's short for "repository"; we and many others sometimes use this abbreviation). If Gitk is not installed on the lab machines, you could also use the git log command.

Last, note that our reference page has tutorials and references on git.

We have prepared a couple of very brief exercises using git. First, go to your cs170/ directory. Now, type:

$ git checkout -b git-lab/mergeA origin/git-lab/mergeA

This will create a new branch named git-lab/mergeA. This branch should only have a single file called merge.c. Type ls to verify. This is a simple program that simply prints three characters to the screen. (Note: You may see other files besides merge.c, if you created them but did not check them into your lab1 branch. These files are not tracked by git, so they persist across checkouts). You may compile and run this program by typing:

$ make merge   # To compile
$ ./merge      

Exercise 9. (This goes in answers.txt.) What is the name of the first commit to the tree in which this branch resides? (Hint: This is much easier if you use a git browser. An example is gitk. Another option is to use the git log command.)

Now we will create another branch called git-lab/mergeB. Type:

$ git checkout -b git-lab/mergeB origin/git-lab/mergeB

This branch also contains a single file called merge.c. Verify with ls. This program is very similar to the one you saw before. The only difference is that it prints out a different set of characters. Make sure that this is so.

One of the strengths of git is that it allows multiple users to work from the same repository independently from each other. Eventually, though, all of the work must be merged together into a final product Usually, git will do this automatically for you. However, there are times when multiple users modify the same place in a file, in which case git cannot know whose work should be used (only a human can manually resolve a "conflict" of this kind). You will be doing such conflict resolution, but here and throughout the semester, you must be careful: a botched merge is a reliable source of headaches. The two branches that you have just created have been set up so that they will cause exactly such a conflict when merging. Type the following into a console:

$ git branch
  git-lab/mergeA
* git-lab/mergeB
  lab1
$ git merge git-lab/mergeA
Auto-merging merge.c
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in merge.c
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the results.

Now would be a good time to go back over Eddie Kohler's excellent introduction to git. See especially the section on Conflicts; search for the word "scary".

Exercise 11. What is the name of your commited merge? Place your answer in answers.txt.

This completes the work of the lab. The final step is handing it in. Switch back to the lab1 branch (git checkout lab1).

Handing in the lab

• Make sure that you are on the lab1 branch, and inside your lab1 directory.
• Make sure that you have answered all written, numbered exercises above in answers.txt.
• Make sure you have answered all code exercises in the files, with all blocks of code commented, as described in the introduction.
• Then upload a tarball or zip file of lab1 directory to GauchoSpace. (We understand that the tarball may not contain the merge.c file; that is okay.) This completes the lab.

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