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Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces Version 1.00 (Available free online!) |
This course covers the principles of operating systems. It emphasizes the basic concepts of OS kernel organization and structure, processes and threads, concurrency and synchronization, memory management, file systems, and communication. It is also a project course, providing essential experience in programming with concurrency, implementing and unmasking abstractions, working within an existing complex system, and collaborating with other students in a group effort.
The following table outlines the schedule for the course. We will update it as the quarter progresses.
The course is organized as a series of lectures by the instructor, discussion sections by the TAs, reading, homework, and project assignments, and exams:
The course will have four homeworks. I will post them as the quarter progresses. You may type or handwrite your answers, and we will use gradesource for submitting homeworks. We will reduce homework grades by 20% for each day that they are late.
Due to extensive copying on homeworks in the past, I have changed how homeworks are graded. As long as you submit a technical answer related to the question, you will get full credit for the question. The goal of the homeworks is to give you practice learning the material. The homework questions both supplement and complement the material from lecture and in the project, and you will also find the homework questions to be useful for practicing for the exams. We will post solutions to all homeworks after they are submitted, and you can use them for studying as well. But, even with the solutions, the amount you learn from the homeworks will be directly correlated with your effort working on them.
I encourage you to collaborate on the homeworks: You can learn a lot from your fellow students. 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 hall with others, go home, and then write up your answer to the problem on your own.
The course has one tutorial project and three programming projects using the Nachos instructional operating system.
Discussion sections answer questions about the lectures, homeworks, projects, and programming environment. They may also supplement the lectures with additional material.
Your grade for the course will be based on your performance on the homeworks, midterm and final exams, and the three projects using the following weights:
The academic honesty guidelines outlined by Charles Elkan apply to this course. I urge you to resist any temptation to cheat, no matter how desperate the situation may seem. If you are in circumstances that you feel compel you to cheat, come to me first before you do so.
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)
D. M. Ritchie and K. Thompson, The UNIX Time-Sharing System, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 7, July 1974, pp. 365-375.
C. A. R. Hoare, Monitors: An Operating System Structuring Concept, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 10, October, 1974, pp. 549-557.
Blaise Barney, POSIX Threads Programming, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Andrew D. Birrell, An Introduction to Programming with Threads, DEC SRC Research Report 35, January 6, 1989.