Preface

Disclaimer: The translated content of this article was generated by a large language model.

This is the third post in my series sharing experiences of self-studying online computer science courses.

 

Course Introduction

MIT 6.1810: Operating System Engineering is a classic operating systems course. My primary way of learning was completing the 9 labs of the xv6 project. First, let me share some learning resources:

1. Course Website: Public resources of the course. If you want to study older versions, you can find resources from previous years on the website.
2. Course Recordings: The Fall 25 course is not open to the public, so you can refer to the 2020 version to supplement some knowledge.
3. Online Textbook: The handouts and notes provided with the course itself are very detailed. In addition, the main reference materials include the xv6 Reference Manual, the K&R C Programming Language Textbook, and some RISC-V instruction manuals. Another classic operating systems textbook is Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, which introduces operating systems from the perspectives of virtualization, concurrency, persistence, and security.
4. Project Code: This is the xv6 project skeleton for the course. Note that this repository is slightly different from the official xv6 repository hosted on GitHub. The official repository only provides an implementation of xv6 for the RISC-V architecture, whereas the individual branches for the course lab assignments are maintained in MIT's own Git repository.
5. My code implementation is publicly available here. Compared to the original repository, it provides a development environment set up using Nix flake and another configured with devcontainer. Additionally, the project already provides a comprehensive testing framework and abundant test cases. You can refer to the Makefile in each lab branch for specific usage.

Summary of Learning Content

The course covers various aspects of operating systems with a vast amount of knowledge, which demands a certain capacity for self-study and reading extended materials. What impressed me the most was the paging design related to memory management, including Copy-on-Write (COW), large page copying, and memory allocation for multiprocessors. For every lab, it is crucial to think through the design before coding, especially by reading the related designs in xv6 first. While writing these labs, the recommended papers for each lecture are also well worth reading. Each one can be treated as a part of the design and evolutionary history of the operating systems field. Even though much of this content has now become purely educational examples or historical cases, the evolution of these designs still provides ideas for subsequent research and study.

Other Related Content

The operating systems course taught by Teacher Yanyan Jiang from Nanjing University is excellent. Over the past two years, he has been promoting the value of AI large language models in assisting learning and research. His course website and the entire set of related educational resources also attempt to open-source as much as possible using AI. I also highly agree with his approach of introducing the entire course from the perspective of operating system APIs, which is very different from other operating system courses.