[COFF] Most folks here started their OS learning with Unix

[Clem Cole]

The architects of MIT's 6.828 course "Operating Systems Engineering") were
unsatisfied with the current stable of systems for teaching, so they did a
reimplementation of 6th Edition in modern ANSI C (with a couple of GNU
extensions for things like assigning names to registers) targeting a
multiprocessor x86.

As I look it, it is a clean interesting, and accessible piece of work.  As
the person that mentioned it to be said: "a modern take on a classic" - the
course if being offered this fall at the URL:   6.828 / Fall 2014
<http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6.html>

The latest xv6 source is available via
        git clone git://pdos.csail.mit.edu/xv6/xv6.git
<http://git//pdos.csail.mit.edu/xv6/xv6.git>

Tools are can be found at:   6.828 / Fall 2014
<http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/tools.html>

Using the MIT course or the Lion's text will teach how the kernel works and
how a user program interacts with it.   IMO: Lion's commentary is super and
100% of the source is there to read and ponder.  Please remember that
generations of the best kernel hackers started with this document (although
some of us predate it - but when I saw it I made a copy).

And as I said, I just looked at the MIT documents and they are awesome too;
but I have just opened them up and have not yet gotten a chance to try the
exercises.

What is even cooler is if you want to try xv6 - it will just run on your
system using QEMU (which the MIT folks point too - they even made some mods
to QEMU to help with their project).
ᐧ

On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 10:00 AM David <david at kdbarto.org> wrote:

> Myself it was v6 (most likely the typesetter version).
>
> What I’d like to see discussed is how people today learn to write,
> enhance, design, and otherwise get involved with an OS.
>
> When I was teaching at UCSD my class on Unix Internals used writing a
> device driver as the class project and covered an overview of the Unix OS
> using the Bach book. Even then (the late 80’s) it was hard to do a deep
> dive into the whole of the Unix system.
>
> Today Linux is far too complex for someone to be able to sit down and make
> useful contributions to in a few weeks possibly even months, unlike v6, v7
> or even 32v. By the time of BSD 4.1[a,b,c] and 4.2 those had progressed to
> the point that someone just picking up the OS source and trying to
> understand the whole thing (VM, scheduling, buffer cache, etc) would take
> weeks to months.
>
> So what is happening today in the academic world to teach new people about
> OS internals?
>
>         David
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