CMSC 412 - Operating Systems

Fall 2001

Sections 0101 and 0102

General Course Information


Instructor:	Bobby Bhattacharjee
	bobby@cs.umd.edu
	4147 A. V. Williams Building

Office Hours:	Wednesday, 10:00 a.m. -- 12:00 p.m.
	E-mail is the easiest and fastest way to contact me.
	Please put the string "CMSC 412: " somewhere in the subject line of your message

Room and Time:	0102 Classroom Building
	Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30p.m. -- 1.45 p.m.

Teaching Assistants:	Vijay Gopalakrishnan (gvijay@cs.umd.edu)
	Roger Lee (rogerlee@cs.umd.edu)

Course Description

We will cover the basic principles of Operating Systems with a focus on trying to understand how these concepts are applied in modern systems. We will learn about process, I/O, and scheduling in classical and modern Operating Systems. Specifically, we will cover different process management schemes, inter-process communication models, scheduling policies, synchronization primitives, and storage structures. If possible, we'll try to cover the implementation of the networking subsystem implementation inside different OSs. We will selectively implement a number of different parts of an OS, both using user-level thread libraries, and on low-level hardware and hardware emulators. As such, this course will have a significant programming component.

Prerequisites

CMSC 311 (or ENEE 350) and CMSC 330.
Experience with some flavor of Unix and programming in C or C++.

Reading

The textbook for the course is:

Operating System Concepts, Fifth Edition
by Abraham Silberschatz and Peter Baer Galvin, John Wiley & Sons. The Wiley corporate link is here .
The sixth edition of the book is now available; but it came out too late for us to use it this semester.

Here is a list of other books you may find useful:

Unix Internals: The New Frontiers by Uresh Vahalia; Prentice-Hall.
This is probably the best book for learning about modern Unix-like OSs.
The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System by John S. Quarterman, Keith Bostic, Marshall Kirk McKusick, and Michael J. Karels; Addison-Wesley.
The classic book about BSD, now updated for 4.4BSD. Linux really needs to have such a resource.
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens.
A very valuable resource for those who don't like to read man pages (and sometimes the OS source code).
Phreads Programming: A POSIX Standard for Better Multiprocessing by Bradford Nichols, Dick Buttlar an Jacqueline Proulx Farrell, O'Reilly.
This is a book on learning how to use user-level thread libraries, specifically, the POSIX standard pthreads.
To understand how the lowest levels of the course OS was implemented (by Dave Hovemeyer), you may want to look at Protected Mode Software Architecture by Tom Shanley; Addison-Wesley. Dave also used The Undocumented PC by Frank Van Gilluwe as a low level PC hardware reference.

You do not have to buy any of the books in this list, but you may want to look for them in the library. Also, it should be clear that this course is going to be somewhat biased towards Unix and Unix-like systems such as Linux.

Grading

Project	30%
Final Exam	25%
Midterm	15%
Programming Assignments and Homeworks	25%
Class Participation	5%

The grading criteria is subject to change during the semester.

Handouts and Assignments

Syllabus
Assignment 0 [Goodie pack]
Assignment 0'
Assignment 1 [Goodie pack]
Homework 0
Assignment 1'
Assignment 2 [Goodie pack]

Newsgroup

Please keep up with and participate in the class newsgroup. I will use the newsgroup for broadcast announcements and to answer questions that may be interesting to more than one of you. Further, the newsgroup is the best medium for asking questions about homeworks, for debugging your programming environment, and for posting the latest OS rumor. Thus, unless it is private, post to the newsgroup before writing e-mail.

Attendance, Group Interactions, and Class Participation

This is a senior-level course; I will not mandate you to come to class (you are still responsible for all the material covered in class). The class project is a major part of this course, and please be aware that you will be working in groups of four. Lastly, note that 5% of your grade is based upon class participation. This is to encourage you to voice your ideas in class and to post them to the newsgroup. Minimally, I must know your name by the end of the term in order for you to get any points for class participation.