Table of Content

Lectures and labs

• For lecture slides, please refer to the schedule page.
• For lab sessions, please refer to the Moodle page.

Reference books

• Main textbook: Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau. Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. Freely available online.

• Silberschatz, Galvin, Gagne. Operating Systems Concepts. Wiley. (Preferably 8th edition or above.)

• A.S. Tanenbaum. Modern Operating Systems. Pearson education. (Preferably 3rd edition or above.)

• S. Mathews, T. Newhall, K. Webb. Dive into systems. Freely available online.

  • This is a multidisciplinary textbook, which covers C programming, computer organization and architecture, (Intel and ARM) assembly programming, operating systems, and parallel computing. May be useful for the pre-requisites (C programming, notions of assembly and computer architecture).

Past exams

(This section will be filled in throughout the semester.)

Misc. documentation (for the lab sessions)

• Installing Linux

  • For the 2024-2025 academic year, we recommend using the Ubuntu 24.04 Linux distribution.

  • A few slides on how to install Linux on a Windows machine

  • Virtualization software for Windows PCs

    • For running a Linux virtual machine on a PC with Windows, we recommend using VirtualBox.
    • Helpful links for enabling enhanced features in VirtualBox:
      • How to install VirtualBox guest additions
      • How to set up shared folders between a VirtualBox virtual machine and the host system

  • Virtualization software for Macs

    • For running a Linux virtual machine on a Mac computer with macOS, we recommend using VMware Fusion Player 13 both for Intel x86 and Arm (“Apple Silicon”: M1, M2) based Macs.

• Linux online man pages (from man7.org)
  

• GDB (the GNU Debugger):

  • GDB manual
  • GDB tutorial from UMD
  • GDB tutorial (quick guide) from Beej
  • GDB quick reference (cheat sheet)
  • a 2-page summary of GDB commands for x86-64 systems
  • Chapter 3 of the “Dive into systems” textbook
    

• A list of Linux system calls
  

• [Advanced topic] A very detailed/advanced description of how system calls are implemented on Linux/Intel processors
  

• Intel/AMD x86_64 processors

  • Note: These processors equip the vast majority of the machines that you will use at the University (servers and desktop machines). They also (most likely) equip your own laptop/PC.

  • A short description of function calling conventions and stack frames on x86_64

  • CMU documentation on x86_64 machine-level programming:

    • Document (quite long but very clear/accessible)

    • Lecture slides:

      • Basics
      • [Control flow] (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15213-f15/www/lectures/06-machine-control.pdf)
      • Fuction calls
      • Data
      • Advanced details

  • The specification of the ABI used by Linux on x84_64

• For assembly programming, see also “Dive into systems” (freely available):

  • Chapter 7: Intel/AMD 64-bit x86 assembly
  • Chapter 8: Intel/AMD 32-bit x86 assembly
  • Chapter 9: ARM 64-bit assembly

Useful references about C programming

• Reminder: The material presented by Grégory Mounié for the training on C programming and Git is available here.

• Books and documents in English:

  • S. Mathews, T. Newhall, K. Webb. Dive into systems. (Freely available) - Chapters 1, 2 and 3.
  • B. W. Kernighan, D. M. Ritchie. The C Programming Language (2nd edition). Prentice Hall, 1988.
  • K. N. King. C Programming. A Modern Approach (2nd edition). Norton, 2008.
  • J. Gustedt. Modern C (2nd edition). Manning, 2019. Freely available as a pdf ebook from the following page: https://modernc.gforge.inria.fr
  • T. Love. ANSI C for UNIX programmers.
  • M. Dahlin. C for Java programmers.(See section 1.1: Reading)
  • J. H. Silverman. C Reference Card.
  • CMU C Bootcamp
  • Types in C

• Books and documents in French:

  • B. W. Kernighan, D. M. Ritchie. Le Langage C (2e edition). Dunod.
  • B. Cassagne. Introduction au langage C. 1998.
  • A. Braquelaire. Methodologie de la programmation en C. Dunod.

Useful references about programming on 64-bit machines

• IBM developerWorks. Porting Linux applications to 64-bit systems
• Andreas Jaeger. Porting to 64-bit GNU/Linux
• Intel blog. All about 64-bit programming in one place.

Misc. articles for further reading

Some interesting (and usually relatively short) articles about specific/timely topics related to operating systems. (Note: these are optional readings.)

• A parallel between (OS/paging/swapping) memory management techniques to avoid “thrasing” (pathological performance collapse) and managing multitasking in your real life. Understanding the former may help you with the latter. And vice versa.

  • Peter J. Denning. Multitasking Without Thrashing. Communications of the ACM. September 2017. [pdf]

• A story (from 2003) about an attempt to introduce a “security backdoor” in the Linux kernel. Here are a few additional details to help you understand the principle of this attack:

  • The attack targeted the (kernel-side) implementation of wait4, a variant of waitpid.
  • In the Linux kernel, current is a global variable that points to the task_struct (i.e., the process control block) of the currently running process.
  • current->uid corresponds to the user ID of the owner of the currently running process.