W4118 OPERATING SYSTEMS I

Fall 2013 -- Junfeng Yang

Class Virtual Machine setup instructions

We prepared a class virtual machine (VM) to make it simpler for you to work on the programming assignments. The VM runs Ubuntu 12.04. It comes with necessary tools such as git. Download the compressed VM here and uncompress it. Since the VM is large, we recommend you download the VM with your machine plugged into the CS wired network.

To run the VM, install either VMware Workstation for Windows or Linux, or VMware Fusion for Mac. A CS account will provide access to VMware licenses and software at no additional cost.

Once the VM boots, please login with user name w4118 and password w4118.

QEMU setup instructions

QEMU is a modern and fast PC emulator. Unfortunately, QEMU's debugging facilities, while powerful, are somewhat immature, so we highly recommend that you use version of QEMU patched by MIT folks instead of the stock version that may come with your distribution. To download and build your own patched version of QEMU on CLIC machines:

  1. Clone the QEMU git repository

    git clone http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/qemu.git -b 6.828-0.15

  2. Configure the source code

    ./configure [--prefix=PFX] [--target-list="i386-softmmu x86_64-softmmu"]

    The prefix argument specifies where to install QEMU; without it QEMU will install to /usr/local by default. For your convenience, set PFX to be inside your home directory. The target-list argument simply slims down the architectures QEMU will build support for.

  3. Run make && make install

You may also install QEMU on your host machine. On Linux, you may need to install the SDL development libraries to get a graphical VGA window. On Debian/Ubuntu, this is the libsdl1.2-dev package. You can find more information about the version of QEMU we're using here.

Running xv6 with make

The Makefile provided with xv6 has several phony targets for running the system:

  1. make qemu
    Build everything and run xv6 with QEMU, with a VGA console in a new window and the serial console in the terminal where you typed this command. Close the VGA window or press Ctrl-C or Ctrl-A X to stop.
  2. make qemu-nox
    Run xv6 without the VGA console.
  3. make qemu-gdb
    Run xv6 with GDB port open. Refer to the GDB section.
  4. make qemu-nox-gdb
    Run xv6 with GDB port open, without the VGA console.

GDB debug instructions

QEMU supports debugging with GDB. To debug with GDB:

  1. Run xv6 with GDB port open
     make qemu-gdb
    or
     make qemu-nox-gdb
    depending on whether you want the VGA console.
  2. Run GDB with the kernel binary
     gdb kernel
    and GDB will automatically connect to the GDP port.

Refer to the GDB Manual for a complete instruction of GDB. Some commands are proved to be useful.

QEMU monitor

QEMU itself has a built-in monitor available to inspect and modify the machine state. Press Ctrl-A C in the terminal running QEMU to get into the monitor. Refer to the QEMU Manual for a complete instruction of QEMU monitor.

Some commands are pariticularly useful:

Remote access

You can work remotely by connecting to a machine via SSH. If you desktop runs Linux or MacOS, you should be able to instal an SSH client easily. For example, on Ubuntu, run

$ sudo apt-get install openssh-client

If your desktop runs Windows, you'll need to install two programs. First, you need an SSH client, such as the putty SSH client or Cygwin with the OpenSSH package. To get the GUI window working on your desktop, you also need an X server, such as the Xming X Server or the XWin32 Server. Configure your SSH client to forward X11 streams.


Git

Git is a distributed version control software. We use git to distributed all kernel program assignments. To learn about Git, take a look at the Git user's manual, or, if you are already familiar with other version control systems, you may want to read this Git overview.