Operating Systems (Fall 2014)

Course Outline

Here is the course outline for COMP 3000: Operating Systems.

Lectures and Exams

Note that the topics below are primarily chapters from the class textbook, Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. Note that while introductory and summary dialogues are not linked below, they are worth reading for an informal take on the material.

Date	Topic
Sept. 5	Lecture 1: Introduction
Sept. 10	Lecture 2: Processes, Process API
Sept. 12	Lecture 3: Limited Direct Execution
Sept. 17	Lecture 4: CPU Scheduling, MLFQ
Sept. 19	Lecture 5: Lottery Scheduling, Multi-CPU scheduling
Sept. 24	Lecture 6: Address Spaces, Memory API
Sept. 26	Lecture 7: Address Translation, Segmentation
Oct. 1	Lecture 8: Free space management, Paging
Oct. 3	Lecture 9: Concurrency and Threads, Locks
Oct. 8	Lecture 10: Concurrent Data Structures, Thread API
Oct. 10	Lecture 11: Condition Variables, Semaphores, Concurrency Problems
Oct. 15	Lecture 12: TLBs, Smaller Tables
Oct. 17	Lecture 13:
Oct. 22	Midterm (in class)
Oct. 24	Midterm solutions
Nov. 5	Lecture 14: Swapping: Mechanisms, Swapping: Policies, VAX/VMS
Nov. 7	Lecture 15: I/O Devices, Hard Disk Drives
Nov. 12	Lecture 16: RAID, File and Directories
Nov. 14	Lecture 17: File System Implementation, FFS
Nov. 19	Lecture 18: FSCK and Journaling, Log-structured FS
Nov. 21	Lecture 19: Data Integrity and Protection
Nov. 26	Lecture 20: Distributed Systems
Nov. 28	Lecture 21: NFS, AFS
Dec. 3	Lecture 22: Virtual Machines, Event-based Concurrency
Dec. 5	Lecture 23: Class Summary and Review
TBA	Final Exam

Tutorials

Each week you will get a progress grade from 0-4, given to you by a TA. If you are being diligent, you should be able to get 4's every week. The easiest way to get your grade is to come to tutorial and meet with your TA; alternately, you can meet a TA in their office hours or, at their discretion, discuss things with them online.

Date	Tutorials
Sept. 5,8	UNIX Introduction
Sept. 12, 15	Simple Shell
Sept. 19, 22	Scheduler
Sept. 26, 29	ELF, dynamic libraries
Oct. 3, 6	Paging, Threads, Concurrency
Oct. 10	(Optional) Continue Tutorial 5 and help with Assignment 5
Oct. 17, 20	Review
Nov. 7, 10	Block devices, Filesystems
Nov. 14, 17	User-mode Filesystems
Nov. 21, 24	Partitions and boot loaders
Nov. 28, Dec. 1	Networking, Network Filesystems

Assignments

Due Date	Assignments
Sept. 10	Assignment 1
Sept. 17	Assignment 2
Sept. 24	Assignment 3
Oct. 4 (extended)	Assignment 4
Oct. 16 (Thurs.)	Assignment 5
Nov. 12	Assignment 6
Nov. 19	Assignment 7
Nov. 26	Assignment 8
Dec. 3	Assignment 9

Course Software

In this course we will primarily working with Lubuntu, a low-resource variant of Ubuntu Linux distribution. You may use other Linux distributions in the tutorials to complete the assigned work; there will be differences, however, in some aspects (such as installing software), particularly if you use a distribution not based on Ubuntu or Debian.

In the labs

In the SCS labs you should be able to run the course VM by starting Virtualbox (listed in the Applications menu) and selecting the COMP 2406/3000 virtual machine image. After the VM has fully booted you will be automatically logged into the student account; this account has admin privileges and its password is "tneduts!".

We highly recommend running your VM in full-screen mode (select from the menu, not by maximizing the window). Do all of your work inside of the VM; it should be fast enough and you won't have any issues with sharing files or with firewalls/network connectivity.

You can save the work you do from the course VM (in the student account) to your SCS account and restore it to any other copy of the class VM (on your machines or in the labs) by running using the following commands:

 save3000 <SCS username>
 restore3000 <SCS username>
 compare3000 <SCS username>

If you use these commands, use them consistently. That means run restore3000 when you first log in, and run save3000 just before logging out. If you don't do this, you will erase the work that you had done previously when you save.

If you forgot to restore and you want to save, try running this:

  rsync -a -v --progress ~/ <SCS username>@access.scs.carleton.ca:COMP3000/

This is the same as the save3000 command minus the options (--delete and --force) that deletes files in the destination that don't exist in the source. As a check, you may want to add the -n option to do a dry run.

Running the VM on your own machines

If you want to run the VM appliance on your own system (running essentially any desktop operating system you want), just download the virtual appliance file and import. The SHA1 hash of this file is:

 e5613881b28be41f49b82730282d40093388ee71  COMP 2406-3000 Fall 2014.ova

On Windows you can compute this hash for your downloaded file using the command FCIV -sha1 COMP 2406-3000 Fall 2014.ova. If the hash is different from above, your download has been corrupted.

If the application is not VirtualBox, you'll need to:

Have the VM platform ignore any errors in the structure of the appliance found during the import process;
Uninstall the VirtualBox guest additions by typing starting a terminal application and running

  sudo apt-get purge virtualbox-guest-x11 virtualbox-guest-utils

Install your platform's own Linux guest additions, if available.