CS503: Operating Systems (Spring 2012)

Course Information

MWF 11:30am-12:20pm
Beering Hall 1245

Instructor:
Kihong Park
email: park@cs.purdue.edu
phone: 494-7821
office hours: M 12:30am-1:30pm, W 10:30am-11:30am; LWSN 1211

Teaching Assistants:
Satish Kumar Eerpini
seerpini@purdue.edu, 496-9431 (LWSN B116E)
M 2:30pm-3:30pm, R 12pm-1pm
Wei-Chiu Chuang
chuangw@purdue.edu, 496-9444 (LWSN B132 #11)
T 1:30pm-3:30pm

PSOs:
M 3:30pm-5:20pm
F 1:30pm-3:20am (HAAS 257)

Textbook:
Operating System Design – The Xinu Approach, Linksys Version

Announcements

Labs/Assignments

Lecture Notes

Please follow instructions given in class for accessing lecture slides (pdf).

The topics listed below which contain material not covered in the lecture slides should be referenced from class notes:

Prerequisites:

Graduate standing in Computer Science, previous operating system class at the undergraduate level (CS 354 or equivalent), ability to read and understand a large non-trivial system written in C, ability to program extensively in C, and command of system development tools.

Grading Policy:

The grade will be determined by a midterm, final, lab assignments, and a group project toward the end of the semester. Their relative weights are:

Midterm 20%
Final 20%
Lab assignments 50%
Group project 10%

QCE:

For those planning to take the CS503 Qual 1 examination, the format is the regular final exam plus additional questions. Please contact the instructor for further information and details.

Labs and Policies:

We will use the XINU operating system for the lab assignments. The XINU lab is located in the HAAS Building Room 257.

Getting your CS account.

Students can get their CS account information on-line. Go to CS homepage, use the ITaP login and password in the upper right-hand corner. This will take you to a page where you agree to the access and usage policies, and then get your CS login and initial password. You also use the same site for doing mid-semester reviews, evaluations, etc. If you have signed up but don't have an account, please contact the accounts@cs.purdue.edu alias.

Late Policy

The due date of lab assignments is a hard deadline. No late submissions are accepted.

Academic Dishonesty

We wish to foster an open and collegial class environment. At the same time, we are vigorously opposed to academic dishonesty because it seriously detracts from the education of honest students. Because of this, we have the following standard policy on academic honesty, consistent with Purdue University's official policy.

It is permissible to discuss a general method of solution with other students, or to make use of reference materials in the library or online. If you do this, you will be expected to clearly disclose with whom you discussed the method of solution, or to cite the references used. Failure to do so will be considered cheating or plagiarism. The use of "method of solution" means a general discussion of technique or algorithm, such as one would reasonably expect to occur standing in front of a whiteboard, and precludes the detailed discussion of code. Specifically, looking at another student's code on his/her computer monitor is NOT allowed.

Unless otherwise explicitly specified, all code that is submitted is to be entirely each student’s own work. Using any code or copying any assignment from others is strictly prohibited without advance prior permission from the instructor. This includes the use of code others have submitted in the past.

All students work is their own. Students who do share their work with others are as responsible for academic dishonesty as the student receiving the material. Students are not to show work to other students, in the class or not. Students are responsible for the security of their work and should ensure that printed copies are not left in accessible places, and that file/directory permissions are set to be unreadable to others (e.g. use "chmod -R 700 *" from your home directory). If you need assistance protecting your work, please contact the TA or the instructor.

Students who encourage others to cheat or plagiarize, or students who are aware of plagiarism or cheating and do not report it are also participating in academically dishonest behavior.

Be aware that we will use a software tool called MOSS to check for copying among submitted assignments. Additionally, the instructor and TA will be inspecting all submitted material to ensure honesty.

Any case of academic dishonesty will be dealt with by a severe grade penalty in the overall class grade and referral to the office of the Dean of Students.

Campus Emergencies:

In the event of a major campus emergency, course requirements, deadlines, and grading percentages are subject to changes that may be necessitated by a revised semester calendar. If such unusual circumstances arise, students may determine any such changes by contacting their instructors via email or phone, and checking the course web page for updates.

Emergencies and campus closings will be announced on local media and on the main Purdue University WWW site http://www.purdue.edu. Individuals may subscribe to an SMS text announcement service. Other details are on the Purdue emergency preparedness site.

Course Content:

This is a graduate introductory course in operating systems that examines how modern operating systems are architected and implemented. Extensive implementation experience is gained by coding, testing, and benchmarking key components of the Xinu operating system on x86/Linksys hardware. A by-product of programming hardware-dependent kernel features in assembly is achieving significant familiarity with x86 hardware, a dominant platform of commodity computing systems.

The topics covered in the course include: evolution of operating systems and computer architectures, process management, memory manangement, virtual memory, file systems, I/O subsystems and device management, virtualization and security. In addition to implementing key kernel features in Xinu, we will examine case studies in Linux, UNIX (Solaris and BSD), and Windows that differ from Xinu and each other in significant ways. One important example is how I/O subsystems are architected to handle a range of heterogenous devices and their interrupts, including high-speed USB and wired/wireless network interfaces, that characterize many of today's computing systems. Kernel dependence on changing hardware features and support is an important theme throughout the course that will help familiarize with recent developments such as non-traditional file systems for flash RAM secondary memory prevalent in mobile systems.