xv6 general information

xv6 is a teaching operating system built by MIT. It is based on Sixth Edition Unix, which was originally built for the PDP-11. Unlike Sixth Edition Unix, it runs on x86 and supports multiple cores.

The authors of xv6 have written a detailed book with commentary on it (which refers to line numbers in a corresponding source code printout), which we strongly recommend referring to. You can also see the authors’ explanation of why they wrote xv6.

The version of xv6 we will be using has some changes from the original:

A copy of that version of xv6 is available via

      git clone https://github.com/uva-reiss-cs4414/xv6.git

    

files in xv6

To help navigate the xv6 source code a brief explanation of some selected files: