CS 4414/5416:
Systems Programming

Lab 2: Process Registry

2026-09-04

Lab Logistics Reminder

Primary goal: Work together on something

• Fine to have small groups (up to 4)
• Grab a question sheet per person (as in lecture)
• Work on the lab assignment during the hour

Lab Stories

Stories:

• Last week: CPU idle sample counts
• This week and next: Process management
  • Registry for what processes are alive
  • Status of processes (running, sleeping, stopped)

Will deal with processes in more detail in a bit.
The real goal for now is learning Rust!

Practice Topics

• Writing enum and struct declarations
• Implementing methods on a struct
• Using derive macros
• Error handling with Result
• Using Option
• Using Box smart pointers
• Visibility (public and private)

Something to try

Google cloud shell: https://shell.cloud.google.com

• Convenient Linux dev environment, preview of things to come…
• Can set up Rust with rustup default stable
• I suggest turning off the AI assistant for now

Getting the material

Repo: https://github.coecis.cornell.edu/cs4414-f26/lab-02

• Instructions are in README.md
• Your code should go in lib.rs
• Check progress with cargo test (see Milestones header)

Hand in question sheet at the end of session

• Who were you working with?
• How far did you get by the end?
• What questions came up?