Syllabus and general information for MCS-378: Operating Systems (Fall 2002)

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 turn in their answers to these three questions at the beginning of class the day of your presentation, as a way of making sure we all have a common starting point.

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 1:15pm Thursday (September 5) so that I can make the presentation and lab group assignments in time for the lab staring Monday.

The topics are:

1. September 18: "Scalable Linux Scheduling", Stephen Molloy and Peter Honeyman, FREENIX Track: 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 285-295.
2. September 20: "PMQS : Scalable Linux Scheduling for High End Servers", Hubertus Franke, Shailabh Nagar, Mike Kravetz, and Rajan Ravindran, Fifth Annual Linux Showcase and Conference.
3. October 4 (rescheduled to October 11): "X Meets Z: Verifying Correctness In The Presence Of POSIX Threads", Bart Massey and Robert Bauer, FREENIX Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 221-234.
4. October 15: "The JX Operating System", Michael Golm, Meik Felser, Christian Wawersich, and Jürgen Kleinöder, General Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 45-58.
5. October 29: "The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments", Wilfredo Sánchez, 2000 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, invited talk, updated version as of May 5, 2002.
6. October 30: "GPFS: A Shared-Disk File System for Large Computing Clusters", Frank Schmuck and Roger Haskin, Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2002, pp. 231-244.
7. November 6: "Track-Aligned Extents: Matching Access Patterns to Disk Drive Characteristics", Jiri Schindler, John Linwood Griffin, Christopher R. Lumb, and Gregory R. Ganger, Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2002, pp. 259-274.
8. November 19: "Ningaui: A Linux Cluster for Business", Andrew Hume and Scott Daniels, FREENIX Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 195-206.
9. November 26: "Structure and Performance of the Direct Access File System (DAFS)", Kostas Magoutis, Salimah Addetia, Alexandra Fedorova, Margo Seltzer, Jeff Chase, Drew Gallatin, Richard Kisley, Rajiv Wickremesinghe, and Eran Gabber, General Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 1-14.
10. December 3: "Setuid Demystified", Hao Chen, David Wagner, and Drew Dean, 11th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2002.
11. December 6: "Deanonymizing Users of the SafeWeb Anonymizing Service", David Martin and Andrew Schulman, 11th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2002.
12. December 10: "How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time", Stuart Staniford, Vern Paxson, and Nicholas Weaver, 11th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2002.

Homework assignment policy

Normally homework problems may be turned in at any time up until 10:30 on October 16 for chapters 1-10, and 10:30 on December 13, for the remainder. However, if we would benefit from discussing a homework problem in class, I may issue a "last call" for solutions to that problem, at least a week in advance.

Unless I indicate that a particular problem must be done individually, you may work on any problem in a group of two or three students. One copy of the solution produced by the team should be turned in, with all team members names on it. Write "we all contributed fairly to this solution" and have all team members sign under that statement.

Tests

Honor

Any substantive contribution to your solution by another person or taken from a publication should be properly acknowledged in writing. Failure to do so is plagiarism and will necessitate disciplinary action.

The same standards regarding plagiarism apply to team projects as to the work of individuals, except that the author is now the entire team rather than an individual. Anything taken from a source outside the team should be be properly cited.

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

• 40% Labs (4 @ 10% each)
• 10% Presentation
• 18% Homework (based on fraction done; see above)
• 12% Midterm
• 20% Final exam

Style guidelines

Accessibility

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.