|Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau|
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces
Version 0.90, March 2015 (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 course is organized as a series of lectures by the instructor, discussion sections by the TAs, reading, homework, and project assignments, and exams:
Homeworks are due at the beginning of class on the day specified. We will reduce homework grades by 20% for each day that they are late (end of class is considered late). You must hand in a hardcopy of your homework; disagreements about the contents of emailed homeworks have caused too much grief in the past. (Plus, it takes far too long to print hundreds of homeworks...)
I encourage you to collaborate on the homeworks: You can learn a lot from your fellow students. However, there can be a fine line between collaboration and cheating. 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 library with others, go home, and then write up your answer to the problem on your own. Cheating consists of looking at other student's homeworks and copying the answers, looking at past homeworks and/or solutions from previous versions of the class, searching on the Web, etc. The consequences of cheating will correspond to the severity (e.g., failure of the assignment, failure of the course). Cheating causes many problems for all of us — don't do it, and save us all the grief.
The academic honesty guidelines outlined by Charles Elkan apply to this course.
The course has one tutorial project and three programming projects using the Nachos instructional operating system. We will be coordinating the projects across both sections of CSE 120 this quarter:
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 following table outlines the schedule for the course. We will update it as the quarter progresses.
|9/24||Course Intro||Chapter 1, Chapter 2|
|9/29||OS Architectural Support||Chapter 6||Homework 1: Out||Project 0: Out|
|10/1||Processes||Chapter 4, Chapter 5|
|10/6||Threads||Chapter 26, Chapter 27||Project 0: Due
Project 1: Out
|10/8||Synchronization||Chapter 28, Chapter 29||Homework 1: Due
Homework 2: Out
|10/13||Semaphores and Monitors||Chapter 30, Chapter 31|
|10/15||Semaphores and Monitors||Chapter 30, Chapter 31|
|10/20||Scheduling and Deadlock||Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 32|
|10/22||Review||Homework 2: Due|
|10/23||(Friday)||Project 1: Due|
|10/27||Midterm Exam||Project 2: Out|
|11/3||Memory Management||Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 18||Homework 3: Out|
|11/5||Paging||Chapter 19, Chapter 20|
|11/10||Paging (cont'd)||Chapter 19, Chapter 20|
|11/12||Page Replacement||Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23|
|11/17||File Systems||Chapter 37, Chapter 39, Chapter 40|
|11/19||File Systems||Chapter 37, Chapter 39, Chapter 40||Homework 3: Due
Homework 4: Out
|Project 3: Out|
|11/21||(Saturday)||Project 2: Due|
|11/24||Virtual Machine Monitors||Appendix B|
|11/26||Thanksgiving Holiday||Thanksgiving||Food. Lots of it.||Sleep. Lots of it.|
|12/3||Course Summary, Final Review||Homework 4: Due|
|12/8||Final Exam: 8:00am – 10:59am|
|12/12||(Saturday)||Project 3: Due|
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.