I took a course in Operating Systems that covered the concepts at a high level, but I also want to understand how an actual OS works under the hood. I think this project is really good for understanding that. It's only about 6000 lines of code, so I can understand each part of the OS and even make changes as I see fit. Initially, I am just studying all parts of the system, but I will make small, incremental changes along the way to test my understanding. I am also adding comments to almost every file to ensure that I understand what's actually going on.
Good series where a professor walks through all parts of the operating system and talks about the limitations and features of xv6. Here's the series: The xv6 Kernel.
xV6 Book -> xv6: a simple, Unix-like teaching operating system
MIT Website -> 6.1810: Operating System Engineering
| Data Type | Bits | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| char | 8 | 1 |
| short | 16 | 2 |
| int | 32 | 4 |
| long | 64 | 8 |
You should look at this video; it explains the RISCV architecture and it's pretty good.
xv6 is a re-implementation of Dennis Ritchie's and Ken Thompson's Unix Version 6 (v6). xv6 loosely follows the structure and style of v6, but is implemented for a modern RISC-V multiprocessor using ANSI C.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xv6 is inspired by John Lions's Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition (Peer to Peer Communications; ISBN: 1-57398-013-7; 1st edition (June 14, 2000)). See also https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.1810/, which provides pointers to on-line resources for v6.
The following people have made contributions: Russ Cox (context switching, locking), Cliff Frey (MP), Xiao Yu (MP), Nickolai Zeldovich, and Austin Clements.
We are also grateful for the bug reports and patches contributed by Takahiro Aoyagi, Silas Boyd-Wickizer, Anton Burtsev, carlclone, Ian Chen, Dan Cross, Cody Cutler, Mike CAT, Tej Chajed, Asami Doi, eyalz800, Nelson Elhage, Saar Ettinger, Alice Ferrazzi, Nathaniel Filardo, flespark, Peter Froehlich, Yakir Goaron, Shivam Handa, Matt Harvey, Bryan Henry, jaichenhengjie, Jim Huang, Matúš Jókay, John Jolly, Alexander Kapshuk, Anders Kaseorg, kehao95, Wolfgang Keller, Jungwoo Kim, Jonathan Kimmitt, Eddie Kohler, Vadim Kolontsov, Austin Liew, l0stman, Pavan Maddamsetti, Imbar Marinescu, Yandong Mao, Matan Shabtay, Hitoshi Mitake, Carmi Merimovich, Mark Morrissey, mtasm, Joel Nider, Hayato Ohhashi, OptimisticSide, Harry Porter, Greg Price, Jude Rich, segfault, Ayan Shafqat, Eldar Sehayek, Yongming Shen, Fumiya Shigemitsu, Cam Tenny, tyfkda, Warren Toomey, Stephen Tu, Rafael Ubal, Amane Uehara, Pablo Ventura, Xi Wang, WaheedHafez, Keiichi Watanabe, Nicolas Wolovick, wxdao, Grant Wu, Jindong Zhang, Icenowy Zheng, ZhUyU1997, and Zou Chang Wei.
The code in the files that constitute xv6 is Copyright 2006-2022 Frans Kaashoek, Robert Morris, and Russ Cox.
ERROR REPORTS
Please send errors and suggestions to Frans Kaashoek and Robert Morris (kaashoek,rtm@mit.edu). The main purpose of xv6 is as a teaching operating system for MIT's 6.1810, so we are more interested in simplifications and clarifications than new features.
BUILDING AND RUNNING XV6
You will need a RISC-V "newlib" tool chain from https://github.com/riscv/riscv-gnu-toolchain, and qemu compiled for riscv64-softmmu. Once they are installed, and in your shell search path, you can run "make qemu".