Current Catalog Description

More Course Description

Topics include:

• OS Objectives, Types and Structures
• The Hardware and Architecture Support for OS
• Process Description and Control
• Concurrency
• Scheduling
• Memory Management
• File Management
• Distributed System and Network

Textbook

Siberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne

Operating System Concepts, (Sixth Edition)

Addison-Wesley, 2003. (see here for additional resources related to the text.)

References

Michael Kifer and Scott A. Smolka

OSP: An Environment for perating System Projects 1/e

Addison-Wesley, 1991. (see here for ordering and additional resources related to the text.)

W. Stallings,

Operating Systems (Fourth Edition)

MacMillan Pub..

M. J. Bach,

The Design of the UNIX Operating System

Prentice Hall.

• Overview (see classnote here and here)
• Process and Threads (see classnote here and here)
• CPU Scheduling (see classnote here )
• Process Synchronization and Deadlocks (see classnote here)
• Memory Management
• Virtual Memory
• File System
• I/O Systems
• Distributed Systems

• Assignment 1 (due date 9/18/02)
• Assignment 2 (due date 9/25/02)
• Assignment 3 (due date 10/2/02)
• Assignment 4 (due date 10/14/02)
• Assignment 5
• Assignment 6 (due date 10/30/02)
• Assignment 7 (due date 11/15/02)
• Assignment 8 (due date 11/13/02)
• Assignment 9 (due date 11/27/02)
• Assignment 10 (due date 12/6/02)
• Assignment 11 (do not collect)
• Midterm Exam (Oct.9, 2002, in SB104, 1:50-3:05 (section 001) and in the regular classroom 5-6:15pm (section 051)) A Sample Exam
• Final Exam (Dec. 9, 2002, 10:30am-12:30pm section 001, 091, 5pm-7pm section 051, 092, 251)

• Homework 1 solution HTML
• Homework 2 solution HTML
• Homework 5 solution
• The Key of the Sample Test

On individual matters, please feel free to contact your instructor via email.

Evaluation

• 40% -- Homework, Programming Assignment, and Participation
• 60% -- Exam

• Explain the range of requirements that a modern operating system has to address.
• Define the functionality that a modern operating system must deliver to meet a particular need.
• Articulate design tradeoffs inherent in operating system design.
• Explain the concept of a logical layer.
• From the perspective of building operating systems, explain the benefits of building these layers in a hierarchical fashion.
• Describe how the resources of the computer system are managed by software.
• Relate system state to user protection.
• Justify the presence of concurrency within the framework of an operating system.
• Demonstrate the potential run-time problems arising from the concurrent operation of many (possibly a dynamic number of) tasks.
• Summarize the range of mechanisms (at an operating system level) that can be employed to realize concurrent systems and be able to describe the benefits of each.
• Explain the different states that a task may pass through and the data structures needed to support the management of many tasks.
• Compare and contrast the common algorithms used for both preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling of tasks in operating systems.
• Describe relationships between scheduling algorithms and application domains.
• Investigate the wider applicability of scheduling in such contexts as disk I/O, networking scheduling, and project scheduling.
• Introduce memory hierarchy and cost-performance tradeoffs.
• Explain what virtual memory is and how it is realized in hardware and software.
• Examine the wider applicability and relevance of the concepts of virtual entity and of caching.
• Evaluate the trade-offs in terms of memory size (main memory, cache memory, auxiliary memory) and processor speed.
• Defend the different ways of allocating memory to tasks on the basis of the relative merits of each.
• Summarize the features of an operating system used to provide protection and security, and describe the limitations of each of these.
• Summarize the full range of considerations that support file systems.