CMSC412 Spring 2018: Syllabus - Academic integrity - Projects - Piazza - Schedule

Overview

The goal is an in-depth understanding of how an operating system manages resources in a computer and provides programmers with a machine and device independent interface. There is a difficult and time-consuming programming project (GeekOS). You are provided with the source code (a few thousand lines of C and some assembly) of a "Unix-style" skeleton operating system for a PC-like x86 platform. You have to understand a large part of this code and augment it in various ways: signals, semaphores, cpu scheduling, memory paging, file system, etc. The x86 platform is simulated by QEMU. The programming environment is Gnu/Linux.

Administrative stuff

A. Udaya Shankar
Email: shankar@cs.umd.edu (put "412" in the subject)
Office: AVW 4141
Office hours: TuTh 1:00-2:30 but easily extendable to 3:30pm (tell me)
Kelsey Fulton (grad), Andrew Putlock, Brian Oluwo, Andrew Wang
CSIC 1122. TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm
CSIC 1121. MW 12:00pm - 12:50pm (section 0101)
CSIC 1121. MW 1:00pm - 1:50pm (section 0102)
Piazza
On Piazza
On Piazza

Topics

• Processes: What is a process, how to create them, run them concurrently, and achieve interprocess communication.
• Threads: What is a thread, how to implement them.
• Scheduling: how to achieve good response times (of interactive applications) and throughput (of background applications).
• Synchronization: Locks, conditions, deadlock freedom, liveness.
• Memory management: Paging, segmentation, swapping, memory allocation, etc.
• File system Interface and Implementation: function calls, mounting file systems, organization of disk blocks, allocation, recovery.
• Disk and storage systems
• Other topics: security, networking, etc.

Schedule

Projects

• Setting up your build environment
• Project submissions on submit server
• GeekOS overview. In a few places, some content is missing (due to latex-to-word conversion). Look here to get any missing content.
• Specifications
  • Project Z: rickroll, 1.5 weeks, Due Feb 2
  • Project 0: pipe, one week. due Feb 9
  • Project 1: fork and exec, two weeks. Due Feb 23
  • Project 2: signals, two weeks. Due Mar 9
  • Project 3: per-cpu variables, two weeks including spring break. Due Mar 23
  • Project 4A: virtual memory, two weeks. Due Apr 6
  • Project 4B: one week. Due Apr 13
  • Project 5B: GFS3, two weeks. Due Apr 27
  • Project 5C: 13 days. Due May 10 (Friday May 11 is reading day)


• One late submission: One project can be turned in after the weekend (when due Friday, it can be turned in on Monday). The best way to use this is to submit both a regular submission and a late submission for every project. Then at the end you can choose which project (if any) to apply it to.

Exams

• Exam 1: Thu Mar 15
• Exam 2: Thu May 3
• Final: Sat May 12 8-10am
• Tell me before the add/drop deadline if you have a problem with the date of exam 1 or exam 2.

Course grade

• Exams 55% (exam 1: 15%; exam 2: 15%; final: 25%)
• Projects: 43%
• Class participation (including Piazza): 2%
  Participation means asking good questions and/or answering questions well. If you are doing poorly and I don't see you engaged with the material, you won't get these points. Typically this makes a difference only if you're just below a cutoff.
• The above percentages may shift slightly (at most ± 2% ).


• Regrade requests must be submitted within a week of the project grade being posted or the exam being returned. After that, they won't be processed.

Texts / slides

You can choose from two texts. For each topic, I'll identify relevant sections in both texts.
• (OSC) Operating System Concepts, Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne, Wiley. 6th edition or later.
• (OSPP) Operating Systems: Principles and Practice, Thomas Anderson, Michael Dahlin.
OSC is gentle and fluffy. OSC 6th edition is available pretty much for free. If you're willing to spend more, OSPP is my choice: it is clearly better than OSC, more concrete and precise. OSPP is less expensive than recent editions of OSC.

Course overview slides
ToyOS slides
OS Process slides
Queueing slides
Multi-threaded programs slides
Implementing standard synchronization constructs slides
Deadlocks slides
Memory management slides
Filesystem slides
Log-structured filesystem:
   http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/file-lfs.pdf
   http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cs161/notes/lfs.pdf (optional)

Videos (Neil Spring)

• Review of 216
  • Sizes - Necessary distinction between sizeof and strlen.
  • Malloc - Model for how malloc tracks memory, how to interpret memory errors.
  • Timing - Reminder of user / kernel separation.
• Synchronization Topics
  • Sychronization Overview - The basics
  • Semaphore Interface - How Semaphores can be used.
  • Semaphore Implementation - How Semaphores are built (so you know what they are and don't reinvent them).

Excused Absence and Academic Accommodations

See the section titled "Attendance, Absences, or Missed Assignments" available at Course Related Policies.

Disability Support Accommodations

See the section titled "Accessibility" available at Course Related Policies.

Read the CS Department Academic Integrity policy. Additional information can be found in the sections titled "Academic Integrity" and "Code of Student Conduct" available at Course Related Policies.

Projects are to be done individually.

Consider each programming assignment to be a take-home exam.

Do not expose your source code to others.

Do not leave it potentially accessible to others, e.g., unlocked unattended laptop, publicly accessible websites, unsecured servers, unsecure communications.

Do not look at another's source code. This applies to code from online searches, e.g., Sourceforge, Stackoverflow, Google.

Interaction via course discussion forum is permitted. Discussion of problems and code solutions is permitted as long as you do not write down code during your discussion and you wait at least 30 minutes after the end of the discussion before you write code based on the discussion.

Web Accessibility