Assignment 2 — Introduction & Purpose
1. What is this assignment about?
This lab will give you practical, hands-on exposure to how Linux reports information about your
system’s hardware, resources, and processes.
You will:
• Explore the /proc filesystem, which is a real-time view into the kernel’s data structures —
no physical files, just live system information.
• Use core Linux utilities (ps, lscpu, df, ip, lsblk, strace, etc.) to gather system
statistics.
• Practice controlling processes with UNIX signals (SIGSTOP, SIGCONT).
• Learn to trace system calls made by programs using strace.
By the end, you’ll be able to:
• Identify your system’s CPU, memory, disk, and network configuration.
• Inspect how many processes are running and what they are doing.
• Monitor I/O usage and network statistics.
• Understand which system calls a program uses to interact with the OS.
2. Why is this important in Operating Systems?
This is where OS theory meets reality.
Here’s what you’re actually learning:
1. Kernel ↔ User Space Bridge
• /proc is your window into kernel space. You’re reading the same data the OS
scheduler, memory manager, and device drivers use.
2. Direct System Monitoring
• No pretty GUI — you will see the raw numbers the kernel tracks for CPU load,
context switches, memory usage, and device activity.
3. Live Application of OS Concepts
• Terms like context switch, load average, system call, and process state become
concrete when you measure them yourself.
4. Real Process Control
• Sending signals to stop and resume a process lets you simulate what the OS does
internally.
5. System Call Awareness
• strace will reveal exactly how a user program asks the OS to open files, read/write
data, or use the network.
3. How is this useful in real life?
You’ll use these skills in many scenarios:
Field / Role How this lab helps
System Administration / Diagnose high CPU/memory usage, spot I/O bottlenecks, track misbehaving
DevOps processes.
Performance Engineering Measure resource usage, identify slow or resource-hungry code.
Debugging &
See why a process is stuck by checking open files, sockets, and syscalls.
Troubleshooting
Security & Forensics Detect suspicious processes or unexpected network activity.
Systems Programming Know which syscalls your program will make and how they behave.
/proc, process states, system calls, and Linux monitoring commands are
Job Interviews
common OS interview topics.
4. Core Concepts You Should Know Before Starting
1. The /proc Filesystem
• A virtual filesystem — nothing stored on disk.
• Files like /proc/cpuinfo, /proc/meminfo, /proc/<PID>/status are
generated on the fly when you read them.
• Used by commands like top, ps, and free behind the scenes.
2. Process IDs (PIDs)
• Each process has a unique ID.
• Used to inspect (ps, cat /proc/<PID>/status) or control (kill) processes.
3. System Calls
• Low-level OS functions like open(), read(), write() that programs use to
access hardware, files, and the network.
• User programs can’t talk to hardware directly — they must use syscalls via the
kernel.
4. Signals
• Asynchronous notifications to a process.
• Examples:
SIGSTOP → pause execution
SIGCONT → resume execution
SIGKILL → terminate immediately
5. Basic Linux Commands
• Viewing files: cat, less, head
• Searching text: grep
• Process listing: ps, top
• Memory/disk info: free, df
• Network info: ip, ss
Short Cheat-sheet
• CPU summary: lscpu
• Logical CPUs: grep -c '^processor' /proc/cpuinfo
• Physical sockets: awk '/physical id/ {ids[$NF]=1} END{print
length(ids)}' /proc/cpuinfo
• Model name: awk -F: '/model name/ {print $2; exit}'
/proc/cpuinfo
• CPU frequency: lscpu | grep MHz or grep 'cpu MHz' /proc/cpuinfo
• Memory: free -h / grep -E 'MemTotal|MemFree|MemAvailable'
/proc/meminfo
• Swap: swapon --show / cat /proc/swaps
• Kernel: uname -r
• Processes: ps -e --no-headers | wc -l
• Context switches: awk '/^ctxt/ {print $2}' /proc/stat
• Uptime: uptime / cat /proc/uptime
• Disk I/O: cat /proc/diskstats ; iostat -dx (optional)
• Filesystem usage: df -hT
• Block devices: lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,FSTYPE,MOUNTPOINT
• Net stats: cat /proc/net/dev ; ip addr show
• FDs: ls -l /proc/<PID>/fd ; lsof -p <PID>
• Stop/Continue: kill -STOP <PID> ; kill -CONT <PID>
• strace: strace -o [Link] -f <command>
• Redirect capture: cmd > outfile 2>&1
