Syllabus and general information for MC78: Operating Systems (Fall 1996)
Overview
This course covers the basics of concurrent programming, operating
systems, networking, and distributed systems. There are two principal
reasons why a course on operating systems is practical to take (as
opposed to just interesting), even if you never expect to be involved
in the development of an operating system (which most of you won't):
-
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. For example, our
first lab will involve you in concurrent programming issues covered
out of our operating systems textbook, but you'll be working on a
multi-threaded distributed application program (written in Java), not
an operating system. 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
database system to run most efficiently. 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) on Wednesdays from 8:00 to
8:50, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:30 to 11:20, on Mondays from
1:30 to 2:20, and by appointment. You may send me electronic mail at
max@gac.edu or call me at extension
7466. I'll try to put any temporary updates to my office hours on my
web page and any long-term updates on my
on-line schedule, so check
there if in doubt.
World Wide Web
All course handouts will be available through my World Wide Web page,
and some supplementary materials such as code to use as a starting
point in assignments may be available there as well. The URL for this
course is http://www.gac.edu/~max/MC78.
Text and readings
The primary text for the course will be Tanenbaum's Modern
Operating Systems, but I'll also be distributing some readings
that are conference papers or journal articles from the last few
years, in order to provide both an update on some recent interesting
work and also a bit more ``meat'' than Tanenbaum, who tends to breeze
through topics rather lightly. Those readings will form the basis for
the student presentations, described below. Lab handouts will also
typically include some non-trivial reading, and we'll spend some class time
previewing each of the labs and discussing the issues that they raise.
Labs
There will be four lab assignments. Each will be available on the
course web page as well as distributed in class; the on-line version
will typically be somewhat preferable (other than for portability) in
that it will have links and be kept up to date if any changes prove
necessary (which I'll announce as well). The due dates for the labs
are shown in the syllabus below.
We'll meet in the OHS 329 lab every Friday except the last day of
classes, and three Mondays as well, which are indicated in the
syllabus. We'll be using the PCs running Linux, which are in the right
rear corner as you enter from the hallway. All the labs will be done
in pairs (or a group of three in one case), and I will be assigning
the lab partners such that you are working with different people for
each lab and for the presentation.
Presentations
There will be four days in the semester when I sit back and relax and
let you guys teach the class instead. Two of those days are at the
end of October and will focus on interesting recent file systems,
while the other two are at the end of the semester and will focus on
interesting recent distributed systems work. In each case, the class
will be structured around one of the papers we read from a conference
or journal. The whole class will be expected to read the paper at
least casually, but the pair (or triplet) leading the class will be
expected to have read it more carefully and done whatever it takes to
really understand it. On each occasion I'll flip a coin at the
beginning of the class to determine which partner presents the
material and which answers questions. (I'll work out something for the
three-person team, probably involving a die.)
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 fact that two of the topics will be at Halloween and two
at the end of the semester.) I'll need to have the rankings Thursday
morning (September 12) so that I can assign lab partners for the first
lab, which starts on Friday the 13th (uh oh, bad luck), given that
I'm trying to assign the presentation partners based on topic
preference ranking and the lab partners based on having you working
with different people each time and different from the presentation.
I'll give a capsule summary of each paper at the first class to give
you some basis for expressing preferences.
The file-system topics for late October are:
- October 29: The Design and Implementation of a
Log-Structured File System by Rosenblum and Ousterhout, 1991.
- October 31: Scalability in the XFS File System by
Sweeney et al., 1996.
The distributed-system topics for December 10th and 12th
are any two of the
following three, chosen based on the expressed preferences:
Tests
I decided to surprise all of you who are used to my doing two
intra-term tests; this course I'm just going to do a midterm and then
the final. The midterm will be on October 24th and the final is as
scheduled by the registrar; tentatively 1pm on December 18th. The
tests will be open book and open notes, and may include problems from
the book.
Honor
Students are encouraged to discuss the course, including issues raised
by the assignments. However, the solutions to assignments
should be individual original work unless otherwise specified. If an
assignment makes you realize you don't understand the material, ask a
fellow student a question designed to improve your understanding,
not one designed to get the assignment done. To do otherwise is to
cheat yourself out of understanding, as well as to be intolerably
dishonorable.
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 assignments
All homework and lab assignments are due at the beginning of class on
the day indicated. Late assignments will be penalized by one ``grade
notch'' (such as A to A- or A- to B+) for each weekday late or fraction
thereof. However, no late assignments will be accepted after graded
assignments are handed back.
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
Please point out any arithmetic or clerical error I make in grading,
and I will gladly fix it. You may also request reconsideration if I
have been especially unjust.
Grading
I will provide you with a letter grade on each homework and lab
assignment and on each test, in addition to the mid-term and final
grades, so that you may keep track of your performance. As a
guideline, the course components will contribute to your final grade
in the proportions indicated below:
- 40% Labs (4 @ 10% each)
- 10% Presentation
- 20% Homework (5 @ 4% each)
- 10% Midterm
- 20% Final exam
Style guidelines
All homework and lab reports should be readily readable, and should
not presuppose that I already know what you are trying to say. In
particular:
-
Use full English sentences where appropriate (namely almost
everywhere, including in mathematical proofs or derivations).
-
Word-process or type your homework if you can. In any case, make sure
it is legible.
-
Use diagrams, tables, programs, and calculations as supporting
components of English writing, not in isolation. Remember that your
goal is to communicate clearly, and that the appearance of these
technical items plays a role in this communication process.
Be sure your assignments are always stapled together and that your
name is always on them.
Accessibility
Please contact me immediately if you have special physical
circumstances, e.g. impaired vision, which may affect the
accessibility of any course components. I will do my best to
facilitate necessary arrangements or resources.
Syllabus
In the reading column, a single number with no decimal point indicates
an entire chapter. Section 0 means the material at the beginning
of a chapter before the first section.
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.
| Date | Reading | Topic | Due
|
|---|
| 9/10 | 1 | Overview |
|
| 9/12 | through p. 45 | Processes and synchronization |
|
| 9/13 | | Lab 1 (races and monitors) |
|
|
| 9/16 | 2.2 | More on synchronization and IPC |
|
| 9/17 | 2.3 | Concurrent programming examples |
|
| 9/19 | 2.4 | Process scheduling | HW 1
|
| 9/20 | | Lab 1 (concludes) |
|
|
| 9/23 | lab 2 | How threads and synchronization work |
|
| 9/24 | 3.0-3.2 | Multiprogramming and swapping | Lab 1
|
| 9/26 | 3.3 | Virtual memory |
|
| 9/27 | | Lab 2 (Implementing threads and synchronization) |
|
|
| 9/30 | 3.4-3.6 | Page replacement | HW 2
|
| 10/3 | 3.7-3.8 | Segmentation |
|
| 10/4 | | Lab 2 (continued) |
|
|
| 10/7 | | Lab 2 (continued) (a Monday lab) |
|
| 10/8 | 4.0-4.2 | File system API |
|
| 10/10 | 4.3.0-4.3.4 | File system implementation | HW 3
|
| 10/11 | | Lab 2 (concludes) |
|
|
| 10/14 | 4.3.5-4.4 | Reliability, performance, security |
|
| 10/15 | 4.5 | Protection | Lab 2
|
| 10/17 | lab 3 | Lab filesystem overview |
|
| 10/18 | | Lab 3 (A filesystem) |
|
|
| 10/21 | | Lab 3 (continued) (a Monday lab) |
|
| 10/22 | | Review/catch-up |
|
| 10/24 | | Midterm |
|
|
| 10/29 | LFS paper | Log-structured File System (student presentation) |
|
| 10/31 | XFS paper | Scalability in the XFS (student presentation) |
|
| 11/1 | | Lab 3 (continued) |
|
|
| 11/4 | 5.0-5.3 | I/O and disk scheduling |
|
| 11/5 | 5.4-5.6 | More on I/O |
|
| 11/7 | 6.0-6.5.3 | Deadlocks |
|
| 11/8 | | Lab 3 (concludes) |
|
|
| 11/11 | 6.5.4-6.8 | More on deadlocks |
|
| 11/12 | lab 4 | Lab 4 preview | Lab 3
|
| 11/14 | 7.0-7.3 | Unix |
|
| 11/15 | | Lab 4 (Deadlock detection and recovery) |
|
|
| 11/18 | 7.4-7.6 | More on Unix | HW 4
|
| 11/19 | 8.0-8.3 | MS-DOS |
|
| 11/21 | 8.4-8.6 | More on MS-DOS |
|
| 11/22 | | Lab 4 (continued) |
|
|
| 11/25 | 9 | Intro to distributed systems |
|
| 11/26 | 10.0-10.2 | Networking; client/server |
|
|
| 12/2 | 10.3 | Remote procedure calls |
|
| 12/3 | 10.4 | Group communications |
|
| 12/5 | 11.4 | Atomic transactions | HW 5
|
| 12/6 | | Lab 4 (continued) |
|
|
| 12/9 | | Lab 4 (concludes) (a Monday lab) |
|
| 12/10 | paper | Student presentation |
|
| 12/12 | paper | Student presentation | Lab 4
|
| 12/13 | | Review/catch-up/evaluation |
|
|
| 12/18 | | Final exam, 1pm (tentative) |
|
Course web site: http://www.gac.edu/~max/MC78
Instructor: Max Hailperin <max@gac.edu>