Introduction to Operating Systems

CS 3224

2011 Spring

M/W 10-12

http://cis.poly.edu/jsterling/cs3224

Instructor: John Sterling
Office: LC125
email: jsterling@poly.edu
phone: (718) 260-4138
Office Hours: Check my homepage. Other times you can schedule an appointment or drop by and see if I'm free.

Course Description: Overview of user interface. Process structure, creation and context switching; system calls; process cooperation. Memory management; virtual memory. I/O management; interrupt handling. File structures; directories, fault-tolerance. Design project involving construction of portions of operating system required.

Textbook: Modern Operating Systems, Third Edition; Andrew Tanenbaum; Prentice Hall.
Author's URL: www.cs.vu.nl/~ast.
You are expected to read the material before the corresponding lectures.

Lecture Schedule. This schedule is tentative.

NB: Chapters 10 & 11 do not generally have their own lecture slots. They discuss Unix and NT, respectively. Their material will be introduced and discussed throughout the semester where it fits into the appropriate topics. You are responsible for the material in both of these chapters.

Outside Reading

• MINIX
• Lottery Scheduling
• Priority Inversion and the Mars Pathfinder
• Posix Threads: part 1, part 2 and part 3
• Carr & Hennessy; WSClock - A Simple and Effective Algorithm for Virtual Memory Management; ACM 1981
• Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust

Grading

• Curve? No. The cutoff for an A- is an overall grade of 90. For C-, the cutoff is 70.
• Class participation will affect your grade. Speak up.
• Midterm 30%
• Projects: 30%
• Final: 40%

  Exams will be closed book with no notes and no calculators. The final exam will cover the entire course.

Cheating

Cheating will not be tolerated.

For projects:

• Using code from anyone outside your group is cheating.
• It will also count as cheating if you give your code to someone else. Therefore if two groups submit the same (or essentially the same) code for a project then it is assumed that all members of both groups were cheating.
• If your project includes code that is designed to make your project display correct answers for a particular data set, that will be identified as cheating. You will receive a zero for the project.

If you are at all confused by this then speak to me - ahead of time.

Projects

• Project description links are on My Poly.
• Projects can be done alone or with a partner.
  • If you want a partner, find one yourself or send me email. I will not force people to be partners, but will help you to find others who wish to have a partner.
  • Partners must develop all code together. Plan on sitting and writing it together. (In the programming biz, this is called "pair programming".)
  • Both partners are responsible for all of the code.
  • If your partner leaves the country the day before the project is due, that should have no impact on you at all as you have all the code and understand it all.
• Projects may be coded in C, C++ or Java.
• The projects must work in order to receive any credit. Code that does not compile, link and run will get a zero. Code that runs but doesn't really work will also get a zero.
• For the projects, I have no interest in a GUI. If you provide one, be sure that the code for the algorithm is still easy to read and not cluttered with code for the GUI.
• Get started with the projects quickly. Ask questions early.
• Projects will be accepted late but with penalties.

Slides

If I use slides, they will appear here as pdf files.

Do not assume they cover everything you need to know. Your notes had better be more detailed than these slides. Be aware that studying the slides and skimming the textbook has not proven to be an effective technique for most students.

Sample Code

• Using Unix
• Processes: fork and exec
• Multithreading
• Producer - Consumer Problem Using PThreads (from Tanenbaum)
• Pipes
• Signals

Other Resources

Listed below are related, but not at all required, useful materials.

• The Design of the Unix Operating System; Maurice J. Bach; Prentice Hall.
  Explains in detail the workings of AT&T's Unix System V. An excellent source for understanding the workings of a real operating system. Linus Torvalds says that he learned a great deal from it when he was working on the first verions of Linux.
• Understanding the Linux Kernel; Bovet & Cesati; O'Reilly.
  Detailed, mostly understandable, description of the Linux Kernel as implemented on the Intel 80x86 architecture.
• Advanced Unix Programming in the UNIX Environment; W. Richard Stevens; Addison-Wesle. When programmers need to do serious Unix coding, they usually turn here for a reference.
• Unix Hater's Handbook. Once available only in print, now it's online.
• Windows Internals; David A. Solomon and Mark E. Russinovich; Microsoft Press. Reviewers generally agree that this is the best guide to the architecture and internals of Microsoft's operating systems. For a "how to program guide", you will need to look elsewhere.
• IA-32 Intel® Architecture Software Developer’s Manuals If you want the technical down and dirty about all aspects of the IA-32/64 architecture (the instruction set, how interrupts work, etc.), here it is. Three manuals and well over a thousand pages.
• Vista's changes to the kernel
• How to say Linux
• History:
  • Multics
  • Bell Labs' History of Unix.
  • IBM's Archives
  • A Walk through "Visible Storage" by Len Shustek
• Various sites you can get versions of Unix
  • Minix: http://www.minix3.org/
  • FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/
  • Linux
    • Slackware: http://www.slackware.com/
    • Fedora: http://fedora.redhat.com/
    • Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/
  • Solaris: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp
    • Solaris Man Pages: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/40.10

Maintained by John Sterling (jsterling@poly.edu). Site last updated January 3, 2011