CS 456 Systems Programming
Contents
Catalog Description
An introduction to both program translation and operating systems. There will be a survey of topics such as: top-down and bottom-up parsing, scanning, code generation, symbol table management, linkers and loaders, batch processing systems, interacting processes, multiprogramming systems, and memory management. Prerequisite - C or better in CS 202.
Prerequisites
C programming.
Standard Content
Course Outline
- Version control: Make, RCS, Git
- File system I/O - open/close/read/write, printf/scanf, opendir/closedir/readdir/stat
- Local interprocess communication: signals, socketpairs, shared memory.
- Fork and execve: how shells work.
- Regular expressions (review!)
- Condensed introduction to x64 assembly language.
- How assemblers work.
- Structure of ELF files -- use of tools like objdump, readelf, nm, od.
- Lex/flex and yacc/bison examples starting with a simple calculator and then a simple programming language (something on the level of Dartmouth BASIC).
Learning Outcomes
Solid understanding of the Unix/Linux API. Basic understanding of programming language translation.
Important Assignments and/or Exam Questions
- Write a variant of ls(1) requiring accessing permissions and subdirectory traversal.
- A basic shell (command interpreter) with a read, parse, execute loop using a PATH, I/O redirection and pipes.
- Assembly language programming exercises, with a view to introducing the subset of assembler needed for compiler code generation.
- Extend calculator example done in class -- student might add parenthetical expressions or named (one line) functions, for example.
- A working compiler for a simple programming language.
- A working assembler would be a less time consuming alternative if more time was spent on the shell.
Standard resources
- The manual.
- Linux System Programming: Talking Directly to the Kernel and C Library, Edition 2, Robert Love (O’Reilly)
- flex & bison, by John Levine (O’Reilly)
