Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective — Lab Assignments

Lab implementations for CS:APP 3e. Environment runs on macOS via a lightweight Linux VM — no Docker required.

Prerequisites

• macOS (Apple Silicon or Intel)
• Lima

brew install lima
brew install lima-additional-guestagents  # required on Apple Silicon

Environment Setup

All lab binaries are x86-64 Linux ELF. The included csapp.yaml defines an x86-64 Ubuntu 22.04 VM with all required tooling pre-installed.

Provision (first time):

limactl start ./csapp.yaml

Daily use:

limactl shell csapp   # open Linux shell
limactl stop csapp    # shut down when done

Your macOS home directory is mounted read-write inside the VM at the same path. Edit on macOS, compile and run inside the Lima shell.

Labs

All commands run inside the Lima shell.

Lab	Directory	Command
Data Lab	data/	make && ./driver.pl
Bomb Lab	bomb/	./bomb
Attack Lab	attack/	make gdb-ctarget / make gdb-rtarget
Cache Lab	cache/	make && ./driver.py
Shell Lab	shell/	make && ./sdriver.pl
Malloc Lab	malloc/	make && ./mdriver
Proxy Lab	proxy/	make && ./driver.sh

The Attack Lab targets require -q to skip the CMU grading server — the attack/Makefile handles this automatically. GDB is pre-configured with Intel syntax via attack/.gdbinit.

Resources

• CS:APP 3e (book)
• Student site
• Video lectures