Here are some practice that will hopefully make you feel more comfortable and more productive when you poking around with os161 syscalls.

Tired of bmake & bmake install every time?

Edit $OS161_SRC/mk/os161.kernel.mk, find this line:

all: includelinks .WAIT $(KERNEL) 

Add some lines below it:

all: includelinks .WAIT $(KERNEL) 
    #generate tags for ctags, excluding some directories
    cd $(TOP);ctags -R --exclude='.git' --exclude='build' --exclude='kern/compile' .; cd- 
    #automatically execute bmake install after bmake
    bmake install 

Then a single bmake will automatically generate tags for your source file as well as install the executable.

Work on file system calls first

Work on file system calls and make them work correctly first, since user level I/O functions (most importantly printf) rely heavily on sys_write and sys_read of console. If you first work on the process system calls, how would you assure your code is right? Without a working and correct printf, most of the test programs won't work.

Test your code

Test programs in $OS161_SRC/user/testbin are very helpful when you want to test your code, especially badcall(asst2), filetest, crash (for kill_curthread), argtest (for execv) and forktest.

You can use the p command provided by os161 kernel menu to execute this test programs:

OS/161 kernel [? for menu]: p /testbin/argtest abc def ghi jkl mno p 

Use GDB

Without GDB, you're dead. It's really worth spending some time to learn the basic usage of gdb. An upset fact is that you can not watch user level code (or you don't want to bother), so use the "printf debug method" in user code.

Here are a few excellent gdb tutorials that you'll probably find helpful.