CPTS 360 — Systems Programming

Taken Fall 2020 @ WSU · Refactored and improved Spring 2022

A lab series building from first principles up through a complete ext2 filesystem implementation. Each lab introduces a core systems programming concept and builds on the previous.

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Lab Progression

Lab	Topic	Key Concept
prelab1	Stack Frame Analysis	EBP register, frame pointer linked list, BSS/DATA/TEXT sections
lab1	Disk Partitioning + Custom Printf	MBR structure, extended partitions, manual varargs (-m32 only)
lab2	In-Memory Filesystem	Left-child/right-sibling tree, path parsing, save/reload serialization
lab3	Shell Simulator	fork/exec model, pipe chaining (recursive), I/O redirection via dup2
lab4	Multi-threaded LU Decomposition	pthreads, barrier synchronization, LU factorization, forward/backward substitution
lab5	Client-Server File Transfer	TCP socket lifecycle, size-prefix protocol, permission bit decoding
lab6	Full ext2 Filesystem (capstone)	On-disk structures, inode cache, bitmap allocation, path traversal, directory entries

Concept Progression

prelab1: Stack frames, registers, memory layout
   ↓
lab1:    Disk I/O (raw sectors), MBR, custom printf
   ↓
lab2:    Tree data structures, path resolution in memory
   ↓
lab3:    Process creation (fork/exec), pipes, file descriptors
   ↓
lab4:    Threads, shared memory, synchronization primitives
   ↓
lab5:    Network sockets, client-server protocols
   ↓
lab6:    Full filesystem: inodes, bitmaps, directory entries, mount/umount

Build Requirements

Requirement	Purpose
gcc (or clang)	C compiler
make	Build system
gcc-multilib	32-bit compilation for prelab1 and lab1 (-m32)
e2fslibs-dev	ext2 header files for lab6 (sudo apt-get install e2fslibs-dev)
Linux	Required for lab4 (pthread barriers), lab6 (ext2 headers)

Each lab compiles independently with make from within its directory.

Usage

cd lab3 && make && cd bin && ./sh_sim.bin   # shell simulator
cd lab5 && make && cd bin                   # client-server
  sudo ./server.bin  # terminal 1
  sudo ./client.bin  # terminal 2
cd lab6 && make && cd bin && ./main.bin     # ext2 filesystem

Note

This repo is for educational reference only. Not for copying or submitting as your own work.

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