Syllabus and general information for MCS-378: Operating Systems (Fall 2005)

Overview

• Operating systems provide the classic application domain for certain techniques that are useful in other contexts as well. In particular, concurrent programming has traditionally been been an ``operating systems'' topic, but is now quite broadly applicable. Other topics that are no longer the sole province of operating systems include resource allocation, security, and fault tolerance.
• Although most of you won't write operating systems, you'll interface with them. You may write applications programs that make use of the operating system's facilities, or contribute to the design of hardware on which the operating system runs, or find yourself educating an operating system developer about the features that would allow your web server or database system to run most efficiently. You may be a system administrator who has to configure and tune an operating system. An understanding of what goes on inside an operating system will allow you to be more effective in roles like these. You may even find yourself tacking a new feature on in some small corner of an operating system other people wrote.

Office hours

World Wide Web

Text and readings

Labs

Attendance is expected for all lab days. (If you turn in a lab report early, you are excused from the remaining days devoted to that lab.) I will excuse up to two absences per student, for any reason. Use yours wisely. If you exceed this allowance, I may reduce your course grade by one letter grade.

For each lab, I will assign you a lab group. You will work with different people each lab, and with a different person for the presentation than for any of the labs. Thus, over the semester you will work with the majority of the class.

Presentations

Each pair of students will be responsible for setting up a meeting with me the week before their presentation to go over it with me. (You are welcome to additional consultations as well.) At that meeting, you should also give me three straightforward questions about your reading. I will distribute these to the full class. All class members will email me their answers to these three questions by 6am the day of your presentation, as a way of making sure we all have a common starting point. I will look through them and alert you immediately before your presentation if there are any common difficulties you might want to address. No late answers will be accepted for these questions, as their point is to lay the groundwork for the presentation.

I will provide a list of attributes that good presentations have. For each presentation, each student in the audience will be asked to select two of these attributes that were particular strong points, and two that particularly need work. I will summarize this feedback for the presenters. I will also use the same list of attributes to structure my own evaluation of the presentation, which will take place in a face-to-face "debriefing" with the presenters, with the grade generated as a summary of that meeting.

I'm going to ask you to express a preference ranking for the topics, and will try to the extent possible to assign people to topics based on that. (You can also take into account in your preference rankings the timing of the presentations.) I'll need to have you email me the rankings by noon Monday (September 12) so that I can make the presentation and lab group assignments in time for the lab staring at the end of that week.

The title links below point to the official versions on the main USENIX site. These will give you the abstracts of the papers, and for the older ones even the full text. For the newer ones, you can get the full text from any on-campus location by using the link labeled "on-campus version."

1. October 19: "Energy Efficient Prefetching and Caching", Athanasios E. Papathanasiou and Michael L. Scott, USENIX 2004 Annual Technical Conference, General Track, pp. 255-268.
2. October 28: "Live Migration of Virtual Machines", Christopher Clark, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Jacob Gorm Hansen, Eric Jul, Christian Limpach, Ian Pratt, and Andrew Warfield, NSDI '05: 2nd Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation. (on-campus version)
3. November 14: "A Transactional Flash File System for Microcontrollers", Eran Gal and Sivan Toledo, USENIX 2005 Annual Technical Conference, General Track, pp. 89-104. (on-campus version)
4. November 15: "Designing for disasters", Kimberley Keeton, Cipriano Santos, Dirk Beyer, Jeffrey Chase, and John Wilkes, FAST '04: 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, pp. 59-72.
5. December 5: "Secure Automation: Achieving Least Privilege with SSH, Sudo and Setuid", Robert A. Napier, LISA '04: 18th Large Installation System Administration Conference, pp. 203-212. (on-campus version)
6. December 9: "Non-Control-Data Attacks Are Realistic Threats", Shuo Chen, Jun Xu, Emre C. Sezer, Prachi Gauriar, and Ravishankar K. Iyer, Security '05: 14th USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 177-192. (on-campus version)
7. December 13: "Finding Security Vulnerabilities in Java Applications with Static Analysis", V. Benjamin Livshits and Monica S. Lam, Security '05: 14th USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 271-286. (on-campus version)

Daily preparation assignment

Each class day (not counting lab days), you are to send me an email by 6am with your preparation assignment for that day. (Presumably this means you should send it before you go to bed.) I will look these over in order to shape the class to meet your needs. As additional incentive, they will count for a portion of your class grade, based on how many you submit. No late preparation assignments are accepted, as that would undermine their real purpose.

For classes with a student presentation of a conference paper, the preparation assignment will consist of questions provided by the presenters, as described in the section on presentations.

For all other class days, your assignment is to send me an agenda for that day's class. Is there old business from prior days that you see as needing more time? In the new topics from that day's reading, what are the main points we should cover? What illustrations, programs, or other examples from the book would you like to go over? Are there items for which you would like a different example?

Homework assignment

You are to select your own homework problems. Each of the eleven chapters in the textbook ends with exercises, programming projects, and exploration projects. You may submit any of these, subject to the restrictions listed below. If I indicate that your initial solution is inadequate, you can submit a revised version, as many times as are necessary to succeed. For each one you eventually succeed at, you will receive one percentage point toward your course grade, up to a maximum of 22%. Thus, your grade will be maximized if you average two successful problems per chapter. Other than that, the restrictions are as follows:

• You will receive credit for at most three problems in each chapter, though you may submit initial attempts on more than that.
• The beginning of class on the review day before the midterm exam is the final deadline for all chapters covered before then. The beginning of class on the review day at the end of the semester is the final deadline for the remaining chapters.
• You may not choose Programming Project 3.1, Exploration Project 6.6, Exploration Project 8.6, or Programming Project 10.7.
• You may not choose any exercise or project that we have previously worked in class.

Tests

Honor

You are expected to be familiar with the college academic honesty honor code policy, and to comply with that policy. If you have any questions about it, please ask. One specific requirement of that policy is that you write the following in full and sign it on every examination and graded paper:

On my honor, I pledge that I have not given, received, nor tolerated others' use of unauthorized aid in completing this work.

For the purposes of this policy, I am defining "graded papers" to be project reports but not daily preparation assignments or homework problems. (I still expect you to comply with the honor code on homework problems, just not to write the explicit pledge on them.) When project reports are co-authored, each co-author should write and sign the pledge.

One additional issue that arises from the team authorship of project reports is that all team members must stand behind all reports bearing their names. All team members have quality assurance responsibility for the entire project. If there is irreconcilable disagreement within the team it is necessary to indicate as much in the reports; this can be in the form of a ``minority opinion'' or ``dissenting opinion'' section where appropriate.

Late lab assignments

If you are too sick to complete an assignment on time, you will not be penalized. Simply write ``late due to illness'' at the top of the assignment, sign your name and hand it in. Other circumstances will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Grade changes

Grading

• 32% Labs (4 @ 8% each)
• 8% Presentation
• 22% Homework (based on number done)
• 8% Daily preparation assignment (based on fraction done)
• 15% Midterm
• 15% Final exam

Style guidelines

Accessibility

If you have a learning, psychological, or physical disability for which a reasonable accommodation can be made, I would be happy to refer you to the college's disability services coordinator, and to cooperate in the accommodation process. It is generally best if this can be done as soon as possible.

Syllabus

This is my best guess as to the rate at which we will cover material. However, don't be shocked if I have to pass out one or more revised syllabi.