The Diary of an Operating System Developer

Day0:
Today, I spent most of my time working on the shell exercise provided by MIT operating system course.
Before I get started, I read the chapter 0 of the xv6 book which teaches the major concepts for implementing new features, such as Pipeline, I/O redirection and Background processes.
I didn't need to implement the shell from the ground up because the course I enrolled provides a skeleton shell.
So my work was to read the snippets of code so that I could understand how the shell actually works.
After studying the source code, I realized that the shell uses an incredible algorithm for the parser (through the use of recursivity), and by knowing that, I felt engaged to complete this exercise properly.

Day1:
I didn't do too much today, however, I started reading LAB1 from MIT and compiled a custom QEMU (provides new features) which will be used massivelly throughout the OS course.
I hope I'll be learning many things while studying it, and as I said few weeks earlier, I'll be sharing nice stuffs as I gain knowledge.

The 2011 MIT OS course provides videos, well, not good image quality, but I have been learning a lot watching them.
Finally, I found out what I want to do until the last day of my life, and I wouldn't face this challenge if I'm not going to do the best in-class homework.

Today, I was also talking with a friend at #GCC (IRC channel hosted by Freenode Server), and the following doubt arises: I didn't understand the meaning of the below sentence.
"It's even smart enough to know that if you tell it to put (x+1) in a register, then if you don't clobber it, and later C code refers to (x+1), and it was able to keep that register free, it will reuse the computation."

After much thinking and throwing my own head against the wall (I'm kidding =]), I got its actual meaning.
When you clobber a register, you're telling that this register may be changed unexpectedly, so GCC can no longer count on the values you loaded into the clobbered registers.
Also, it means it's smart enough to know that if you load an expression into a register you should never clobber it unless it's really needed.
For example, if the code refers to that expression later the GCC would optimize it by avoiding another processing of the same expression.

That's all for this post. I hope you liked it.
Regards, Raphael S.Carvalho