OS161: Arguments Passing in System Call

One principle of kernel programming is that: do not trust anything users passed in. Since we assume that users are bad, they will do anything they can to crash the kernel (just as $OS161_SRC/user/testbin/badcall/badcall.c do). So we need pay special attention to the arguments of the system calls, especially the pointers.

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OS161 Process Scheduling

OS161 provides a simple round-robin scheduler by default. It works like this:

  • hardclock from $OS161_SRC/kern/thread/clock.c will be periodically called (from hardware clock interrupt handler)

  • Two functions may be called there after:

    • schedule to change the order the threads in ready queue, which currently does nothing
    • thread_consider_migraton to enable thread migration among CPU cores
  • Then it will call thread_yield to cause the current thread yield to another thread

We need to play with the schedule function to give interactive threads higher priority.

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OS161 File Operation Overview

In user space, when open a file, user program will get a file descriptor (a integer) that represent that file. User can use this descriptor to perform various operations on this file: read, write, seek, etc. As I see it, this design is quite clean in that:

  • Hide most of the details from user, for both safety and simplicity

  • Enable more high level abstraction: everything (socket, pipe..) is a file

The file descriptor is actually an index to kernel space structure that contains all the details of opened files. So at kernel side, we need to do a lot bookkeeping stuff.

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OS161 pid Management

There are many way to manage each process's pid. Here is the way I do it.

I decided to make minimal modification to $OS161_SRC/kern/thread/thread.c, in case anything is ruined. So I only add two things to the thread module. One is I add a t_pid field to struct thread so that getpid system call is trivial. Another is I add a call of pid_alloc in thread_alloc to initialize new thread's t_pid. That's it. No more touch on the thread module.

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OS161 execv System Call

Basically, execv do more or less the same thing with runprogram in $OS161_SRC/kern/syscall/runprogram.c. The overall flow of sys_execv are:

  1. Copy arguments from user space into kernel buffer
  2. Open the executable, create a new address space and load the elf into it
  3. Copy the arguments from kernel buffer into user stack
  4. Return user mode using enter_new_process
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