Reading materials

Operating Systems Textbooks

• xv6: A simple, Unix-like teaching operating system by R. Cox, F. Kaashoek, and R. Morris.
  • Our primary textbook. Used for hands-on learning about operating systems.
• OS Three Easy Pieces by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau.
  • Our supplemental textbook. Used for various operating system concepts such as virtual memory, schedulers, and threads.
• The Little Book of Semaphores by Allen B. Downey.
  • Used to understand semaphores in the barrier problem

UNIX

Unix was based on Multics, which was a timeshared OS developed by MIT, General Electric, and Bell Labs. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (of Bell Labs) worked on Multics. Multics (MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service) had lots of good and novel ideas, but it was never a commercial success. Sometime around 1968, Bell Labs withdrew from the project. Thompson and Ritchie continued their OS work at Bell Labs, first on a PDP-7 computer and then on a PDP-11. Somewhat poking fun at Multics, they called their new OS, Uniplexed Information and Computing Service or Unics. At some point the name became Unix.

• Youtube Unix intro
• The UNIX Time-Sharing System, Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken L.Thompson, Bell System Technical Journal 57, number 6, part 2 (July-August 1978) pages 1905-1930.
• The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System, Dennis M. Ritchie, 1979.
• The following image shows Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie using a PDP-11 computer. Sometime in 1969, they began Unix development on a PDP-7, which had 8K, 18-bit words of memory. Sometime in 1970, they continued development of Unix on a newly purchased PDP-11. Unix was originally written in PDP assembly, but it was re-written in C in 1973. The development of Unix and C have a similar timeline. The orange lines encircle tapes that would have been used to backup code in an archive.

  

C Programming Language

• The C Programming Language (second edition) Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. Prentice Hall, Inc., 1988. ISBN 0-13-110362-8, 1998.
• The Development of the C Language, Dennis M. Ritchie, 1993.

RISC-V Emulation

• QEMU - A fast and popular RISC-V platform and CPU emulator.
  • User manual
• SiFive FU540-C000 Manual
• Virtual I/O Device (VIRTIO)

RISC-V

• The RISC-V Reader: An open architecture atlas by D. Patterson and A. Waterman, Strawberry Canyon, 2017.
• RISC-V unprivileged instructions
• RISC-V privileged instructions
• Calling conventions
• RISC-V Reference Card

GDB

• GDB Webpages TOC
• GDB Webpages Index
• GDB Reference Card

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Questions or comments regarding CPSC 405? Send e-mail to Gusty at ecooper@umw.edu.

Top // CPSC 405 home // Last updated 8-Aug-2024 13:30 EST