COMP3000 Operating Systems 2025W

Note: this page's purpose is to host publicly available material linked from Brightspace. Please use Brightspace as the primary source of information to stay updated.

Course Outline and Student Hours

Aside from the updated version in Brightspace, you can also find it here. Note that only the Brightspace version will contain contact information of the TAs and student hours.

Follow the schedule to meet a TA in the corresponding room. Alternatively, you may also contact the instructor or TAs by email, on MS Teams or booking an appointment to meet online over Zoom.

Extended student hours. Every one or two weeks, a Q&A session will be held online with the instructor. This is similar to regular student hours except that multiple students will be admitted into the session (like a class), and the focus is on lecture topics, e.g., you can ask the instructor to re-explain a concept. For ad hoc technical problems, e.g., how to set up the environment for a tutorial, please attend a TA’s student hours. The meeting time varies as intended and will be announced below and on Brightspace so that if it does not work for a student, it likely will the next time. Priority will be given to students in Section B (if there are too many participants).

Tutorial Instructions

Attending tutorials is required (there is a 0.5 participation mark each) and you need to submit the work by the deadline indicated on Brightspace (for the other 1.5 marks). What is submitted is not graded for correctness but effort showing your attempts and thinking. To receive full marks, make sure to include in your submission how you arrived at the solution or other thoughts (if you figured it out) or any confusion/attempts or even disagreements (if you failed to). After the submission, you should continue to study it if there is still anything you do not understand well, for the assignments and exams.

Tutorial 1

Jan 9 and Jan 10, 2025: Instructions

Tutorial 2

Jan 16 and Jan 17, 2025: Instructions

Tutorial 3

Jan 23 and Jan 24, 2025: Instructions

Tutorial 4

Jan 30 and Jan 31, 2025: Instructions

Tutorial 5

Feb 6 and Feb 7, 2025: Instructions

Tutorial 6

Feb 27 and Feb 28, 2025: Instructions

Tutorial 7

Mar 6 and Mar 7, 2025: Instructions

Tutorial 8

Mar 13 and Mar 14, 2025: Instructions

Tutorial 9

Mar 20 and Mar 21, 2025: Instructions

How to Do Well in This Course

The goal here is to establish a conceptual model to understand how operating systems work to serve applications. It is not a course like math or data structures. To succeed, you need to be more hands-on and focus on figuring out how to find the answers (like learning to fish) instead of the answers alone (like being given a fish). You can NOT expect to do well only by reading course material. You must work with a real OS, with the course material as guidelines. As you progress, you should be gradually able to imagine how various pieces of the OS fit together to function, which will be very useful in your everyday work/life with computers.

If you are asking a lot of "why"s, you are on the right track. Use all available resources (including the course material) as references, like a dictionary, to help answer your "why"s. For example, when you are asked about some information, based on your knowledge, think: 1) which part of the OS should have this information? 2) is it supposed to be available at the point in question? 3) then how do you retrieve that information? e.g., any tool/command/function call? For sure, this would not be possible if you are just getting started, so a bit of confusion at the beginning is normal. As you move on, the conceptual model will become clearer as the basis for your thinking.

Mandatory textbook reading will be posted on Brightspace, and thus not all of the textbook will be covered. The exams and assignments are based on lectures, tutorials and designated textbook chapters.

The mini-quizzes are designed to ensure that you are following along by attending classes or listening to recorded lectures every week. So, they are straightforward, directly from class discussions (unlike the midterm and final exams).