Exercise: system calls

Due: Fri, 07 Oct 2016 11:00:00 -0700

System call tracing

Your first task is to modify the xv6 kernel to print out a line for each system call invocation. It is enough to print the name of the system call and the return value; you don’t need to print the system call arguments.

When you’re done, you should see output like this when booting xv6:

...
fork -> 2
exec -> 0
open -> 3
close -> 0
$write -> 1
 write -> 1

That’s init forking and execing sh, sh making sure only two file descriptors are open, and sh writing the $ prompt.

Hint: modify the syscall() function in syscall.c.

Challenge: print the system call arguments.

Date system call

Your second task is to add a new system call to xv6. The main point of the exercise is for you to see some of the different pieces of the system call machinery. Your new system call will get the current UTC time and return it to the user program. You may want to use the helper function, cmostime() (defined in lapic.c), to read the real time clock. date.h contains the definition of struct rtcdate, which you will provide as an argument to cmostime() as a pointer.

You should create a user-level program that calls your new date system call; here’s some source you should put in date.c:

#include "types.h"
#include "user.h"
#include "date.h"

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  struct rtcdate r;

  if (date(&r)) {
    printf(2, "date failed\n");
    exit();
  }

  // your code to print the time in any format you like...

  exit();
}

In order to make your new date program available to run from the xv6 shell, add _date to the UPROGS definition in Makefile.

Your strategy for making a date system call should be to clone all of the pieces of code that are specific to some existing system call like uptime. Grep for uptime in all the source files, using grep -n uptime *.[chS].

When you’re done, typing date to an xv6 shell prompt should print the current UTC time.

Write down a few words of explanation for each of the files you had to modify in the process of creating your date system call.

Challenge: add a dup2() system call and modify the shell to use it.

What to submit

Write down your explanations of the modifications for date in a file named answers.txt, and upload it using the course dropbox.