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. I forked the repository and added some new functionality to learn more about operating systems.

How to Run

xv6 runs on RISC-V multiprocessor. I use docker and qemu emulator to run the operating system on my computer. You can follow the instructions provided here.

Added functionality

• sysinfo systemcall lets you see current information of the operating system.

$ sysinfo
uptime: 24
total memory: 4096M
free memory: 131M
used processes: 3

• copy-on-write The fork() system call in xv6 copies all of the parent process’s user-space memory into the child. If the parent is large, copying can take a long time. In addition, the copies often waste memory; in many cases neither the parent nor the child modifies a page, so that in principle they could share the same physical memory. The goal of copy-on-write (COW) fork() is to defer allocating and copying physical memory pages for the child until the copies are actually needed, if ever.

• lazy allocation One of the many neat tricks an O/S can play with page table hardware is lazy allocation of user-space heap memory. Xv6 applications ask the kernel for heap memory using the sbrk() system call. In the original kernel, sbrk() allocates physical memory and maps it into the process's virtual address space. It can take a long time for a kernel to allocate and map memory for a large request. To allow sbrk() to complete more quickly in these cases, sophisticated kernels allocate user memory lazily. That is, sbrk() doesn't allocate physical memory, but just remembers which user addresses are allocated and marks those addresses as invalid in the user page table. When the process first tries to use any given page of lazily-allocated memory, the CPU generates a page fault, which the kernel handles by allocating physical memory, zeroing it, and mapping it.

• FCFS original implementation of xv6 uses round-robin scheduling. Clearly, round-robin is a more sophiscated algorithm than FCFS. However, simply as an exercises, I added FCFS scheduling. You can switch between the two using sched system call.

$ sched RR 
$ sched FCFS

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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,[email protected]). 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".