CMSI 387
OPERATING SY S T E M S
Spring 2009
Assignment 0129
This assignment seeks to give you a little command line practice, plus some supplemental reading.
Not for Submission
Supplemental reading for what has been covered so
far includes the conceptual parts of Sections 3.1–
3.3, 8.1–8.2, and 9.1–9.2 in SGG. The implemen-
tation material also previews what’s coming.
For Submission
Process Survey
Login to a computer of your choice (any platform
will do, as long as it lets you do what’s asked below)
and answer the following questions about it:
1. How many root- or system-owned processes are
running on your computer at that time? Pro-
vide a screen or text dump of these processes.
2. How many processes on your account are run-
ning on your computer at that time? Provide a
screen or text dump of these processes.
3. Which root- or system-owned process is using
the most real memory? The most virtual
memory? Provide a screen or text dump of
this process’s information.
4. Run your typical working set of applications on
the computer. Which of these processes is us-
ing the most real memory? The most virtual
memory? Provide a screen or text dump of
this process’s information.
5. Login to keck.cs.lmu.edu. Who else, other than
root and yourself, has processes running at that
time? Provide a screen or or text dump of
those processes.
For each question, provide a short description of
how you arrived at the answer based on the data
provided by the operating system. Strong hint:
Find the optimal way to answer these questions
(i.e., minimize manual labor, like, oh, counting). You
know what I’m getting at, right? :)
Commit your answers as a LaTeX document (in-
cluding image files if necessary) under /homework/
cmsi387/process-survey.
Linux System Calls
Look up the list of Linux system calls (most kernel
versions will do; the current kernel is at 2.6.x) and
scan what each system call does. Then, for each of
these commands or functions, make an educated
guess on which system calls they might be using,
and why:
1. cd
2. pwd
3. I/O redirection
4. Running an executable program from the shell
5. kill
Commit your answers as a LaTeX document under
/homework/cmsi387/system-call-guesses.