COMP3000 Operating Systems 2022W

Note: this page is only used to host publicly available material linked from Brightspace. Do NOT visit it directly for staying updated.

Course Outline

Aside from in Brightspace, you can also find it here.

⚠️ For all submissions (regardless of whether collaboration is allowed), the answers must be your own words. Any answers copy-pasted or rephrased from someone else with high resemblance are identified in your submission, you are subject to being reported to the Dean for plagiarism.

Office Hours

Join the office hours meeting here. You'll need to be signed in to Zoom with your cmail account. Follow the office hours schedule in the course outline. Alternatively, if you can't make it, you may also contact the instructor or TAs by email, on MS Teams or booking an appointment.

Tutorial Instructions

The underlined part of the question (usually HOW) is more important than the rest (usually WHAT).

Remember to find out who your assigned TA is by checking the grade item "TA", attend the tutorial in MS Teams (channel TA-name) on time, repond to the poll, and submit the work by the deadline indicated in Brightspace. You can work on the tutorial until the deadline. The purpose of the synchronous tutorial sessions is just to clarify everything and avoid procrastination. What is submitted is not graded for correctness. After the submission, you should continue to study it if there is still anything you do not understand well, for the assignments and exams.

Instructions for setting up an Openstack instance.

Tutorial 1

Week of Jan 10, 2022: Instructions

Tutorial 2

Week of Jan 17, 2022: Instructions

Tutorial 3

Week of Jan 24, 2022: Instructions

Tutorial 4

Week of Jan 31, 2022: Instructions

Tutorial 5

Week of Feb 7, 2022: Instructions

Tutorial 6

Week of Mar 7, 2022: Instructions

Tutorial 7

Week of Mar 14, 2022: Instructions

Tutorial 8

Week of Mar 21, 2022: Instructions

Tutorial 9

Week of Mar 28, 2022: 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). Memorization of answers and algorithms are NOT the focus of this course. As you progress, you should be gradually able to imagine how various pieces of the OS fit together to function.

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/funcion 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.

Reading the textbook is encouraged but not mandatory, and not all of it will be covered (involved chapters will be posted along with the lectures in Brightspace). The exams and assignments are based on lectures and tutorials. So, make sure you have sufficient understanding of both.