Each assignment indicates how difficult it is:
Easy: less than an hour. These exercise are typically often warm-up exercises for subsequent exercises.
Moderate: 1-2 hours.
Hard: More than 2 hours. Often these exercises don't require much code, but the code is tricky to get right.
The exercises in general require not many lines of code (tens to a few hundred lines), but the code is conceptually complicated and often details matter a lot. So, make sure you do the assigned reading for the labs, read the relevant files through, consult the documentation (the RISC-V manuals etc. are on the reference page) before you write any code. Implement your solution in small steps (the assignments often suggest how to break the problem down) and test whether each step works before proceeding to the next one.
Warning: don't start a lab the night before it is due; it's more time-efficient to spread the work over multiple days. The manifestation of a bug in operating system kernel can be bewildering and may require much thought and careful debugging to understand and fix.
Make sure you understand C and pointers. The book "The C programming language (second edition)" by Kernighan and Ritchie is a succinct description of C. Have a look at this example code and make sure you understand why it produces the results it does.
A few common pointer idioms are particularly worth remembering:
int *p = (int*)100, then
(int)p + 1 and (int)(p + 1)
are different numbers: the first is 101 but
the second is 104.
When adding an integer to a pointer, as in the second case,
the integer is implicitly multiplied by the size of the object
the pointer points to.p[i] is defined to be the same as *(p+i),
referring to the i'th object in the memory pointed to by p.
The above rule for addition helps this definition work
when the objects are larger than one byte.&p[i] is the same as (p+i), yielding
the address of the i'th object in the memory pointed to by p.Although most C programs never need to cast between pointers and integers, operating systems frequently do. Whenever you see an addition involving a memory address, ask yourself whether it is an integer addition or pointer addition and make sure the value being added is appropriately multiplied or not.
If you have an exercise partially working, checkpoint your progress by committing your code. If you break something later, you can then roll back to your checkpoint and go forward in smaller steps. To learn more about Git, take a look at the Git user's manual, or this CS-oriented overview of Git.
If your code fails a test, make sure you understand why. Insert print statements until you understand what is going on.
You may find that your print statements produce a lot of output that you would like to search through; one way to do that is to run make qemu inside of script (run man script on your machine), which logs all console output to a file, which you can then search. Don't forget to exit script.
Print statements are often a sufficiently powerful debugging tool, but sometimes being able to single step through some assembly code or inspect variables on the stack is helpful. To use gdb with xv6, run make make qemu-gdb in one window, run gdb-multiarch (or riscv64-linux-gnu-gdb or riscv64-unknown-elf-gdb) in another window (if you are using Athena, make sure that the two windows are on the same Athena machine), set a break point, followed by 'c' (continue), and xv6 will run until it hits the breakpoint. See Using the GNU Debugger for helpful GDB tips. (If you start gdb and see a warning of the form 'warning: File ".../.gdbinit" auto-loading has been declined', edit ~/.gdbinit to add "add-auto-load-safe-path...", as suggested by the warning.)
If you want to see what assembly code the compiler generates for the xv6 kernel or find out what instruction is at a particular kernel address, see the file kernel/kernel.asm, which the Makefile produces when it compiles the kernel. (The Makefile also produces .asm for all user programs.)
If the kernel causes an unexpected fault (e.g. uses an invalid memory address), it will print an error message that includes the program counter ("sepc") at the point where it crashed; you can search kernel.asm to find the function containing that program counter, or you can run addr2line -e kernel/kernel pc-value (run man addr2line for details). If you want a backtrace, restart using gdb: run 'make qemu-gdb' in one window, run gdb (or riscv64-linux-gnu-gdb) in another window, set breakpoint in panic ('b panic'), followed by followed by 'c' (continue). When the kernel hits the break point, type 'bt' to get a backtrace.
If your kernel hangs, perhaps due to a deadlock, you can use gdb to find out where it is hanging. Run run 'make qemu-gdb' in one window, run gdb (riscv64-linux-gnu-gdb) in another window, followed by followed by 'c' (continue). When the kernel appears to hang hit Ctrl-C in the qemu-gdb window and type 'bt' to get a backtrace.