Operating Systems Coursework #

I completed this report as part of my first year Operating Systems module:

It was an analysis of what actually happens when a user enters the following into a terminal:

less .bashrc

My research/report focused on the Linux Virtual Filesystem, and included the following:

• Components of the VFS, including superblocks, inodes, dentry objects and file objects.
• How paths, e.g. ./.bashrc, are resolved using link_path_walk().
• How files are represented and handled on a per-process basis, including opening, reading from, and closing files.
• The basics of Memory isolation on Linux-based systems.
• How paging works on Linux-based systems, including retrieving pages from secondary storage.
• How processes are spawned from the command line using variations of fork().
• The basics of user mode and kernal mode execution, including the use of syscalls and traps to execute kernel-level operations from a user mode process.

I achieved a grade of 81% for this coursework.