Description
In this project you will write several simple programs and do some simple
experiments. You will put everything, the programs (source codes), their various
outputs, the outputs of utilities, and your descriptions and interpretations into a report
(i.e. document them) that will be submitted as a pdf file. You will also upload the
program sources and a Makefile. We should be able to just type make and obtain the
executable files. All these files (pdf report, README, Makefile, program sources)
will be put into a folder, tarred and gzipped and submitted as a single file in Moodle.
1) Write a simple program p1 that will create a file and will put into the file N blocks
of information where each block is of size 4094 bytes. Hence file size will be N *
4096 bytes. N is a parameter to the program. We will run the program as p1 N. The
information to write to the file can be all zeros. In your program, you will use open,
read, write, close system calls (Linux low-level I/O functions). In this program you
will just use the write system call, not the read system call.
Run the program to generate a file that is large enough (10s or 100s of MB). It will
act as a disk. i.e., it will be a virtual disk.
Then format the virtual disk with Linux ext4 file system (i.e., create an ext4 file
system on the virtual disk). You can do this by mkfs.ext4 command in Linux. You
will use 4096 (bytes) as the block size. See the output of mkfs command. How many
inodes are generated? In Linux file system, inodes are put into an inode table that
occupies some number of contiguous disk blocks (portions of the table can be in
different groups of blocks). There is also an inode bitmap that shows which inodes in
the inode table are used and which inodes are free.
Then, mount the ext4 file system in the virtual disk using the mount command to an
empty subdirectory (let us call this as your mount directory). Then change to that
mount directory. Create some files there. Then unmount the virtual disk (use umount
command). Change to the mount directory again. Are you seeing the files? Now
mount again. Are you seeing the files now in the mount directory? Now unmount
again.
Using the dumpe2fs command, dump information about the ext4 file system in the
virtual disk. See the output. How many blocks are free? Ext4 file system divides the
blocks of the disk into groups. Each group has 32K blocks. How many groups are
there? In group 0, where is the bitmap (on which block)? Is the bitmap big enough to
contain information about all blocks in that group? Where is the inode bitmap
(indicates if an inode in the inode table is used or not)? How many blocks are
2
occupied by the inode bitmap? Where is the inode table in group 0? How many blocks
are occupied by the inode table? How many blocks are free in group 0?
2) Write a program p2 that will list all files and subdirectories in a given directory.
We will run the program as: p2 P. P is the pathname of the directory. Your program
will use opendir and readdir functions to read the directory entries of the given
directory. For each directory entry, which can correspond to a file or a subdirectory,
you will use the stat function to learn more about the attributes of the related file or
subdirectory. For each file (or subdirectory) we need to print the following
information to the screen: name of the file (or subdirectory), inode number, file type,
number of blocks, size in bytes, userid.
3) Write a program p3 that will do random access (read operation) to a file where
each access is of K bytes. We will run the program as: p3 K F. F is the name of the
binary file which you will access in the program. Random access can be done by use
of lseek function. You will use again Linux low-level I/O functions: open, read,
write, close. In your program will measure the time it takes to do an access (a read
operation of specified size). You can measure it using the gettimeofday function.
Your program will do a lot of random accesses (say 100s). At the end, your program
will print out the average random access time.
To do this, first create a large file. The run your program. Record the time output.
Reboot your machine and run the program again. Record the time output.
Clear the disk case (which is caching file data). You can do this by executing the
following command:
sudo echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Then run your program again. Record the time output. Compare and interpret the
results.
Include all outputs and your explanations, discussions into your report.
Submission
Put all your files into a project directory named with your ID (one of the IDs of team
members for team projects), tar the directory (using tar xvf), zip it (using gzip) and
upload it to Moodle. For example, a student with ID 20140013 will create a directory
named 20140013, will put the files there, tar and gzip the directory and upload the
file. The uploaded file will be 20140013.tar.gz. Include a README.txt file as part
of your upload (including the name and ID of the student, at least – for team projects,
names and IDs of all members will be included). Include also a Makefile to compile
your programs. We want to type just make and obtain the executable and object files.
Additional Information and Clarifications
• This project does not require much coding. It requires quite a bit reading, selflearning, trying, and documenting.
