Lab 4 (Graded) Solution

Exercise 1: In nite Forking! (Not Graded)







Goals: We experiment to see the e ect of endless forking.




With this exercise, you may have to reboot your PC if it is running Linux or the VM if Linux is running in VirtualBox. Do not try this on the Sun re server, as it will cause problems to other users.




Read lab4-forkall.c, it attempts to create as many processes as possible. Try the fol-lowing:







Compile it to lab4-forkall. As it is possible that you may need to crash/reboot the system, you should save all les and then run sync (see the sync man).




Open 3 windows. In Window 1, run lab4-forkall. In Window 2, run top which shows you process statistics and the most active processes.




After a while you will notice that fork is failing. Check the number of tasks and the %Cpu.




You may notice that Linux is running quite sluggishly. Also if you have a laptop, you may hear the laptop fan turning ON. This is because the CPU is now working hard. Try running any commands, e.g. ls, in Window 3. You will nd that you may have hit the process limit and shell commands now fail - due to failure to create new processes.




In Window 1, try killing lab4-forkall by typing CTRL-C. If that fails, you may need to reboot.







You may want to repeat this experiment a few times to see what is going on. You can also modify the code to change the value of D (higher or lower).




Since lab4ex1 creates many processes. You can study the e ect of restricting the total number of processes created. In the bash shell, you can use the \ulimit -u n" command to limit the number of processes to n. Most likely, your default setting is unlimited, meaning that the limit is the system limit (it doesn’t mean in nite!). You can try n = 500. What happens now when you rerun the experiment. Be careful in setting the limit too low as it cannot be increased, only decreased. This means that you if you want to make a new higher limit, you will need to start a new terminal (e.g. shell) which is not a child of the process with the limit.







Exercise 2: Observing Process Scheduling (Not graded)







Goals: Explore which processes are scheduled










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The program lab4-forkorder.c attempts to show which process parent or children is run-ning rst. It uses the write() system call which is unbu ered to write to standard output. Experiment with the commented out code to see if the order changes.




Note that the result of this experiment depends very much on the Unix kernel implemen-tation and can even vary between di erent kernel versions of Linux.










Exercise 3: A utility for running many processes - Basic (Graded 30%)







Goals: Understanding creating processes, using fork and execXX (the exec family of system calls)




Please try Exercise 3 rst which covers fork and exec before Exercise 4 which needs more system calls. The percentage mark here re ects that Exercise 3 is easier than Exercise 4.




The task of Exercise 3, which is to write lab4ex3.c, is illustrated using the following example:




$ ./lab4ex3 /bin/echo going to sleep + /bin/sleep 5 + /bin/echo finished




The e ect of lab4ex3 is to mimic running the following 3 programs/processes are in the shell:







/bin/echo going to sleep



/bin/sleep 5



/bin/echo finished






There 2 binaries used with the full pathname (full lename) are: /bin/echo and /bin/sleep. In the event, that these standard binaries are installed elsewhere, you can use the where command to nd the pathname, e.g. where sleep. The echo program just prints its command line arguments, something like Lab 3, while the sleep program waits for the number of seconds given in its argument. So lab4ex3 runs commands given its in arguments with a ‘+’ separating each command. You can assume that for lab4ex3 that the full pathname for the executable is given. Your code must be written to execute the executable using the execve() system call.




We will call the command to be executed a \sub-command line"1 The arguments to lab4ex3 consists of sub-command lines are separated by +. A sub-command line may be empty, in which case, the sub-command is treated as that there is nothing to run for that sub-command, or equivalent to the command /bin/true (note that it is not an error). You an assume that the number of words in a sub-command line is at most 8, e.g. argv[7] is the max as argv[0] is the program name. There will not be test cases which exceed 8 words.2







1Sub-command because there can be multiple commands. Note that in this context, line, does not mean there is a newline. In the example, it refers to 3 command lines.




It is possible to write more robust code which need not use this assumption, analogous to Lab 1. Students who want more robust code can experiment but this is for your interest.









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You will nd that creating executable shell scripts will be useful for testing your code. Shell scripts were discussed in Tutorial 3. Brie y an executable need not be a native code le but also any le for which you specify an interpreter (and it is the interpreter which is the binary being run). The sample le lab4-test.sh will run the bash shell on the le with the pathname to bash speci ed in the rst line. You will need to make sure that the le permission is set to be executable, e.g. chmod u+x lab4-test.sh. Just try running ./labt-test.sh. Note that in Unix there is no such thing as a le su x, so the \.sh" is only a convention to remind the user that it is a shell script.




Errors:




Some errors can arise during execution. Error messages should be written to the standard error (stderr) stream. lab4ex3 should exit on the rst error. If the fork() fails then the error message should be:




fork failure If the execve() fails then the error message should be:




exec failure: S




where S is the relevant sub-command line.




Hints:




You need to use the fork() system call to create a new process. To print to the standard error stream use fprintf(), e.g.




fprintf(stderr, "Value of x=%d\n", x);













Exercise 4: A utility for running many processes - Full (Graded 70%)










Exercise 3 is the pre-cursor to Exercise 4, hence, it is from basic to full. The idea of lab4ex4 is a shell-like tool for running repetitive commands. Note that it has a di erent command line syntax from lab4ex3. The following example illustrates the usage of lab4ex4:




$ ./lab4ex4 gcc -c %




Assume that the standard input to the above example is:




a.c




b.c




c.c







The result would be as if the following was run:




gcc -c a.c



gcc -c b.c



gcc -c c.c






The example illustrated the use ‘%’ which is used to replace an argument with a word from the input line. An input line consists of words (non-space characters) separated by spaces up to a newline (‘\n’). There can be multiple % which are replaced by subsequent words coming from










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the input line. If there are more % than words in the line, it is then no replacement occurs and the % is skipped over. The next example illustrates the use of multiple %. Let the command line be:




./lab4ex4 gcc % % % % %



-c a.c -c b.c -c c.c




-o prog a.o b.o c.o







In the example above, the input data follows the shell command line. (You will need to type




CTRL-D to end the input). This example is similar to running the following in the shell:







gcc -c a.c



gcc -c b.c



gcc -c c.c



gcc -o prog a.o b.o c.o






We are now ready to de ne the syntax for the lab4ex4 arguments. We rst introduce the Unix man syntax, only what is needed for this lab (for more details see (man man)). Anything enclosed by square brackets is optional, which means it need not be present. Italics denote replace by corresponding argument. Bold text is to be typed literally. The syntax for the lab4ex4 command line can be described as:




lab4ex4 [-j m] [-p newpath] prog ...




The -j option speci es that up to m processes can be running the commands resulting from the input. It will try to maximize the number of processes running at any time, e.g. once a process nishes, a new process is created to handle the next command.3 By default, if -j is not given then commands are run sequentially, i.e. m = 1. The -p option is a new PATH given by newpath. We saw that execve() used in Exercise 3 requires the pathname to the executable. However, notice that in the examples for Exercise 4, the pathname to gcc was not given. Some of the exec family of system calls makes used of the PATH environment variable which gives a number of directories separated by ‘:’. For example, suppose PATH is \/bin:/usr/bin" then execvp() will try running the executables in the order \/bin/prog" then \/usr/bin/prog", and executing the rst one which succeeds. See also man execvp, you can see that some exec calls use path (pathname) and le (uses PATH with le).




For lab4ex4, you must use execvp() or execve() to execute the command.4 The errors and error messages from Exercise 3 apply to Exercise 4. lab4ex4 will exit on the Exercise 3 errors even if it has child processes running. You can assume that the length of input never exceeds 128 characters (but we will not test this).5 The maximum number of % is 8.







This is di erent from the job limit in Tutorial 2. In Tutorial 2, the OS waited for all the jobs in the job limit to complete before reading new jobs. Here, once a job nishes, the next one can be started.



4In Linux, execve() is in Section 2 of the manual, so can be considered a system call while the rest of exec is in Section 3, so are library functions which are implemented using execve(). For simpler code, you can use




execvp().

Recall from Lab 1, how to deal with unbounded lines.












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The motivation for Exercise 4 is not only learn how to program with processes in Unix but also to create a semi-useful tool. With more options, it can be a reasonable tool which one might use. An existing tool with similarities is xargs (man xargs). Although the description of the lab has many features, the code can be written quite compactly so it will not be too much programming e ort. However, there is the problem of dealing with bugs in C such as \segmentation faults" when there is a pointer bug.




Hints:




Rather than doing a lot of string manipulation, it is possible to reuse many of the original strings in the process! Dynamic memory allocation is not needed given the assumptions, however, one could also use malloc() for a bit more generality. In order to convert numbers from the string to the integer, you can use atoi(). The wait family of system calls will be useful. To read a line from stdin into a bu er: (assumes buf to be an array of char)




fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), stdin);




The function strtok() may be useful for breaking up a line into words. Look at setenv() for environment variables.







Submission







You should submit the following les using our lename conventions for all les (including the zip). Remember to include your information as a comment at the top of the code. Submit lab4ex3.c and lab4ex4.c (with the correct naming convention) in a single zip le to the appropriate workbin.




Submissions for Lab 1 has been treated as a special case and some leniency has been allowed. For all labs, other than Lab 1, compilation errors are treated as the program being incorrect. Please make sure all code compiles{sometimes students modify the code with comments after they have nished testing which may introduce new errors. So you should double check that everything compiles. Any runtime error means the test case used is failed, i.e. \segmentation fault" is treated as a manifestation of a bug for that test case.









































































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