Syllabus and general information for MCS-378: Operating Systems (Fall 2007)

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

I will be available in my office (OHS 303) from 10:30-11:20 on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays*, and Fridays, as well as by appointment. Or try your luck: just stop by and see whether my door is open. You may send me electronic mail at max@gustavus.edu or call me at extension 7466. I'll try to put any updates to my office hours on my web page, so check there if in doubt. (*Exception: on September 20th, the time will be 2:30-3:20.)

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.

Presentations

Each student 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 10am 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 presenter. 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 presenter, 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 10).

Six out of the seven papers are from USENIX conferences; for these, 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 most of them even the full text. For a couple of the newer ones, the full text on the USENIX site is temporarily restricted to members; for these, you can get the full text from any on-campus location by using the link labeled "on-campus version." The one non-USENIX paper's title is directly linked to an author's copy of the paper.

1. September 25: "Flux: A Language for Programming High-Performance Servers", Brendan Burns, Kevin Grimaldi, Alexander Kostadinov, Emery D. Berger, and Mark D. Corner, 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 129-142.
2. October 5: "Lock Free Data Structures using STMs in Haskell", Anthony Discolo, Tim Harris, Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton-Jones, and Satnam Singh, FLOPS '06: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming.
3. October 18: "CRAMM: Virtual Memory Support for Garbage-Collected Applications", Ting Yang, Emery D. Berger, Scott F. Kaplan, and J. Eliot B. Moss, OSDI '06: Proceedings of the Seventh USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, pp. 103-116. (on-campus version)
4. October 30: "Evaluating SFI for a CISC Architecture", Stephen McCamant and Greg Morrisett, 15th USENIX Security Symposium, 2006, pp. 209-224.
5. November 12: "Rethink the Sync", Edmund B. Nightingale, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Peter M. Chen, and Jason Flinn, OSDI '06: Proceedings of the Seventh USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, pp. 1-14.
6. November 27: "Do Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent?", Michael Piatek, Tomas Isdal, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Arun Venkataramani, NSDI '07: Fourth USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, pp. 1-14.
7. December 13: "Dynamic Spyware Analysis", Manuel Egele, Christopher Kruegel, Engin Kirda, Heng Yin, and Dawn Song, 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 233-246. (on-campus version)

Daily preparation assignment

Each class day (not counting lab days), you are to send me an email by 10am with your preparation assignment for that day. 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? If you have no particular items you want covered, you can always fall back on giving me an outline of the reading, as a last resort.

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 each exam is the final deadline for all chapters covered before then.
• You may not choose Exploration Project 2.1, Exercise 3.2, Exploration Project 3.1, Exploration Project 3.2, Exploration Project 4.2, Programming Project 6.2, Programming Project 7.3, Programming Project 7.4, or Programming Project 10.7.
• You may not choose any exercise or project that we have previously worked in class.

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 report; this can be in the form of a “minority opinion” or “dissenting opinion” section where appropriate.

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.

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

• 30% Labs (5 @ 6% each)
• 8% Presentation
• 22% Homework (based on number done)
• 6% Daily preparation assignment (based on fraction done)
• 11% Intra-term exam 1
• 11% Intra-term exam 2
• 12% 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.