Link to previous topic [1] and the booklet [2] [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212515 [2] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/xv6/xv6-rev6.pdf
And the actual book for the course [1]
Xv6 - Unix V6 rewritten in modern, ANSI C for MIT 6.828
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Xv6 - Unix V6 rewritten in modern, ANSI C for MIT 6.828
#12I came across this in my intro to systems class and thanked the stars. For someone who loves C and systems programming, the Linux kernel can still be overwhelming. This is an awesome way for a kernel newbie to tackle a code base they can handle and see the real effects of their code.
Re: Xv6 - Unix V6 rewritten in modern, ANSI C for MIT 6.828
#13Do students at MIT actually write an OS or do they just do bedtime source code reading?
Re: Xv6 - Unix V6 rewritten in modern, ANSI C for MIT 6.828
#14Do students at MIT actually write an OS or do they just do bedtime source code reading?
I was wondering the same thing. At Emory we were handed a few M68K assembly routines but hand to crank out the rest of the OS ourselves.
It looks like MIT does something similar. They study xv6 but have to implement an OS with different specifications. See http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/overview.html
Re: Xv6 - Unix V6 rewritten in modern, ANSI C for MIT 6.828
#15Another really cool project by Russ Cox, is amazing how prolific he is.
A related project of his that might be of interest to people learning about kernel programming is the documented history of the Plan 9 kernel: http://swtch.com/plan9history/
This post is going to seem a bit fanboyis, but over the years I had some (rather violent) disagreements with Russ and is easy to forget how much stuff he has done, so it was time to remember some of his awesome work.
Now he seems to be spending most of his time hacking on Go ( http://golang.org ) but just from the last few years some of major projects where he has been the main driving force:
* Plan 9 from User Space - Port of the Plan 9 User Space to Unix systems. http://plan9.us
* vx32 - Virtualization similar to NaCL, and ported the Plan 9 kernel to run on it. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/
* Google Code Search, now sadly shut down, but he open sourced the core of the engine. http://code.google.com/p/codesearch/
* RE2 regexp engine - http://code.google.com/p/re2/
And other smaller projects (I'm sure I forget many more):
* libtask coroutines library for C - http://swtch.com/libtask/
* Foundation storage system - http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/misc/foundation/
Before that he was heavily involved with Plan 9 at Bell Labs, being responsible for much of the graphics system (which later was the model for Xrender), storage(venti/fossil), auth/security(factotum/secstore), and all kinds of other work all over the place.
Re: Xv6 - Unix V6 rewritten in modern, ANSI C for MIT 6.828
#16we use this as the basis of our OS course at Columbia. It helps you get an understanding of how an operating system works without having to wade through tons of code.