Course: CMSC 23000 Operating Systems Instructor: John Reppy Hinds 033 TA: Jon Riehl Hinds 024A Lecture: TR 10:30-11:50 Lab: W 3:30-4:50 Ry 251 Office hours:
Monday 3:00-5:00 Hinds 024A And by appointment Mailing list: cmsc23000 at mailman dot cs dot uchicago dot edu http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/cmsc23000
This course aims to provide an introduction to the basic concepts and techniques used to implement operating systems. The course will involve both paper exercises and substantial programming projects. Students are expected to have taken CMSC15400 and have a working knowledge of the C programming language.
I expect to cover most of the topics from the first six chapters of the text (plus some material from Chapters 10 and 12). These include concurrent programming, processes, memory management, I/O systems, and file systems. If time permits, we may also discuss multiprocessor systems. A preliminary syllabus can be found here.
A substantial part of the course work and grade are the two programming projects. The first is a small project that will introduce you to concurrent programming. The second project will involve implementing an operating system for a 16-bit embedded processor.
Note: next year (AY 2006-2007) this course will be offered in the Autumn quarter. Subsequently, it will only be offered every other year (e.g., Autumn 2008, Autumn 2010, ...).
In addition, there is a supplementary text. The programming assignments will be written using the C programming language (specifically, the C99 version). If you do not have a good C manual, we recommend the following:
Title: Modern Operating System (2ed) Author: Andrew S. Tanednbaum Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2001
Title: C -- A Reference Manual (5th Edition) Authors: Samuel P. Harbison and Guy L. Steele Jr. Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2002 Errata: www.careferencemanual.com/errata.htm
Grading for the course will be based on:
There will be two exams: a midterm during the lab time slot on November 8th, and a final exam.
Percentage Component 20% Homework assignments 30% Exams 50% Projects
The following is a list of the handouts that have been distributed in class with links to PDF files. As necessary, we will post revisions here.
Date Handout September 26 Handout 1 --- Course information September 26 Handout 2 --- Programming assignment tips October 3 Homework 1 October 4 Project 1: RCX memory management October 4 RCX internals October 12 Homework 2 October 18 Project 2: RCX kernel October 26 Homework 3 November 2 Homework 4 November 13 Project 3: RCX kernel November 14 Homework 5 November 21 Homework 6
This DEC SRC technical report is a good tutorial for thread programming with mutex locks and condition variables. While it is targeted at Modula-3, the mechanisms are essentially the same as those found in the Pthreads API.
The University of Chicago is a scholarly academic community. You need to both understand and internalize the ethics of our community. A good place to start is with the Cadet's Honor Code of the US Military Academy: "A Cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do." It is important to understand that the notion of property that matters most to academics is ideas, and that to pass someone else's ideas off as your own is to lie, cheat, and steal.
The University has a formal policy on Academic Honesty, which is somewhat more verbose than West Point's. Even so, you should read and understand it.
We believe that student interactions are an important and useful means to mastery of the material. We recommend that you discuss the material in this class with other students, and that includes the homework assignments. So what is the boundary between acceptable collaboration and academic misconduct? First, while it is acceptable to discuss homework, it is not acceptable to turn in someone else's work as your own. When the time comes to write down your answer, you should write it down yourself from your own memory. Moreover, you should cite any material discussions, or written sources, e.g.,
Note: I discussed this exercise with Jane Smith.
The University's policy, for its relative length, says less than it should regarding the culpability of those who know of misconduct by others, but do not report it. An all too common case has been where one student has decided to "help" another student by giving them a copy of their assignment, only to have that other student copy it and turn it in. In such cases, we view both students as culpable and pursue disciplinary sanctions against both.
For the student collaborations, it can be a slippery slope that leads from sanctioned collaboration to outright misconduct. But for all the slipperyness, there is a clear line: present only your ideas as yours and attribute all others.
If you have any questions about what is or is not proper academic conduct, please ask your instructors.