CSE 120 Fall 2007

CSE 120, Fall 2007: Operating Systems

A final from last year for practice Note that this was a year in which Nachos was used as the project, and so there was a Nachos question. I won't be asking any questions on Nachos.

Lectures

Thursday, Sept 27: Introduction. Chapter 1.
Tuesday, October 2: Architectural support. Chapter 2.
Thursday, October 4: Processes. Chapter 3.
Tuesday, October 9: Threads. Chapter 4.
Thursday, October 11: Synchronization. Chapter 6.1 - 6.6.
Tuesday, October 16: Semaphores. Chapter 6.7 - 6.10.
Thursday, October 18: Monitors.
Tuesday, October 23: Campus closed (fires).
Thursday, October 25: Campus closed (fires).
Tuesday, October 30: Scheduling and deadlock. Chapters 5, 7.
Thursday, November 1: Midterm review.
Tuesday, November 6: Midterm.
Thursday, November 8: Memory management.
Tuesday, November 13: Paging.
Thursday, November 15: Page replacement.
Tuesday, November 20: File systems.
Thursday, November 22: Thanksgiving
Tuesday, November 27: FFS, LFS and RAID.
Thursday, November 20: Rio, Journaling, Soft Updates.
Tuesday, December 4: Remote Procedure Calls and NFS.
Thursday, December 6: Course summary, final review.

Homework

Homeworks are due at the beginning of class on the day specified. We will reduce homework grades by 20% for each day that they are late (end of class is considered late). You must hand in a hardcopy of your homework; disagreements about the contents of emailed homeworks have caused too much grief in the past.

Homework 1 (solutions), due at the beginning of class on Tuesday, 10/9.
Homework 2, (solutions), due at the beginning of class on ~~Tuesday, 10/23~~ ~~Thursday, 10/25~~ Tuesday, 10/30.
Homework 3 (solutions), due at the beginning of class on Thursday, November 28.
Homework 4 (solutions), due at the beginning of class on Thursday, December 6.

I encourage you to collaborate on the homeworks: It is an excellent way to deepen your knowledge in the area. However, it is a fine line between collaboration and cheating. Collaboration consists of discussing problems with other students and independently writing your own answers to the problems based upon those discussions; as a rule of thumb, you should be able to discuss a homework problem in the library with others, go home, and then write up your answer to the problem on your own. Cheating consists of looking at other student's homeworks and copying the answers, looking at past homeworks and/or solutions from previous versions of the class, searching on the Web, etc. The consequences of cheating will correspond to the severity (e.g., failure of the assignment, failure of the course). Cheating causes many problems for all of us -- don't do it, and save us all the grief.

The academic honesty guidelines outlined by Charles Elkan for CSE 130 apply to this course.

Exams

Midterm: ~~October 30~~ ~~November 1~~ November 6, in class. Solutions.
Final: December 14 11:30 - 2:30

Discussion

October 17
October 30
November 14
November 28

Project

Project 1 due ~~November 4~~ November 9.
Project 2 due December 7.

Grading

Project: 25 %
Homework: 20 %
Midterm: 25 %
Final: 30 %

Supplemental reading

The supplemental readings include primary sources and in-depth supplements for concepts in the class. Supplemental reading is for your own interest -- the readings are not required, nor will you be tested on the material. Note that some of the links to the documents point to the ACM Digital Library. UCSD has a subscription to the ACM Digital Library, so you will need to use a web browser on campus to access them.

The seminal paper on operating system structure and semaphores:
E. W. Dijkstra, The Structure of the 'THE'-Multiprogramming System, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 5, May 1968, pp. 341-346.
(Additional historical background on semaphores in Wikipedia)
The seminal paper on Unix:
D. M. Ritchie and K. Thompson, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System," The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 57, No. 6, July-August 1978, pp. 1905-1929.
The seminal paper on Monitors:
C. A. R. Hoare, "Monitors: An Operating System Structuring Concept," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 10, October, 1974, pp. 549-557.
A practical guide to programming with threads:
Andrew D. Birrell, An Introduction to Programming with Threads, DEC SRC Research Report 35, January 6, 1989.
An early paper on practical issues with implementing demand paging:
Ozalp Babaoglu and William Joy, Converting a Swap-Based System to do Paging in an Architecture Lacking Page Reference Bits.
Two papers on soft updates:
Gregory R. Ganger et. al., Soft Updates: to the Metadata Update Problem in File Systems.
Margo I. Seltzer et. al., Journalling versus Soft Updates: Asynchronous Meta-Data Protection in File Systems.
A paper on Rio:
Peter M. Chen et. al., The Rio File Cache: Surviving Operating System Crashes .

Administrative information

Professor: Keith Marzullo, email marzullo@cs.ucsd.edu, phone x 4-2266, AIM kilioopu.
Office Wednesdays 3:00-4:00 or by appointment.
TAs: Wenjing Rao, Chengmo Yang
Office Tuesdays 9:00-10:00 (at CSE building basement B260A) and Thursdays 3:00-4:00.
Class: Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:30 - 1:50 in Center Hall 109
Discussion: Wednesdays 12:00 - 12:50, HSS 1330
Textbook: Operating System Concepts, 7th Edition by Silberschatz.