CS 321 - Operating Systems

Meeting time: 10:30-11:30am
Room 106 Chapman Building
University of Alaska Fairbanks

UAF CS F321-F01
3.0 Credits, Spring 2007
Prerequisite: CS 301 (Asm)

Instructor: Dr. Orion Lawlor
ffosl@uaf.edu, 474-7678
Office: 210C Chapman
Hours: noon-1 MWF (or whenever!)

Recommended Textbook:
Operating System Concepts, 7th Edition by Silberschatz, Galvin, & Gagne; 2005 Wiley & Sons (bookstore, or Amazon)

ADA Compliance: Will work with Office of Disabilities Services (203 WHIT, 474-7043) to provide reasonable accomodation to students with disabilities.

Course Website (& links to Blackboard): http://www.cs.uaf.edu/2007/spring/cs321
Machines: ASSERT lab, nanook.uaf.edu, Chapman lab, or Linux CDs available

Course Goals and Requirements

By the end of the course, you will be able to design system-level libraries for a variety of tasks; be familiar with the general abilities and interfaces provided by common operating systems; and understand in a deep way the implementation of modern processor execution, memory, and storage. To understand this, you will need to have experience writing programs in some standard systems programming language (C or C++), with at least some idea of how your code relates to assembly language and how it runs on the real machine.

Calendar

Last day to drop: February 2.  Spring break: March 10-18. Last day to withdraw: March 23. Midterm exam: 10:30am on Wednesday, March 7.  Nanook Springfest (no class): April 27. Last day of class: Monday, May 7. Final exam: 10:15am on Wednesday, May 9.

Student Resources

Academic Help: Google, Rasmuson Library, Academic Advising Center (509 Gruening, 474-6396), Math Lab (Chapman Room 305), English Writing Center (801 Gruening Bldg, 478-5246).

Grading

Your work will be evaluated on correctness, rationale, and insight, not on successful regurgitation of random trivia. Grades for each assignment and test may be curved. Your grade is then computed based on four categories of work:

  1. HW: Homeworks and machine problems, to be distributed through the semester.

  2. PROJ: two substantial software development projects related to operating systems, together with a short presentation of your results. Example projects: build an interesting linux kernel module; write a program that accesses any interesting piece of hardware; write a library that sensibly merges two different interfaces (e.g., Linux and Windows memory-mapping interfaces).

  3. MT: Midterm Exam.

  4. FINAL: Final Exam (comprehensive).

The final score is then calculated as:

TOTAL = 20% HW + 25% PROJ + 25% MT + 30% FINAL

Letter grades are then assigned at the usual 90/80/70 (etc) cutoffs. At my discretion, I may round your grade up if it is near a grading boundary.

Homeworks are due at midnight on the day they are due. Late homeworks will receive no credit. At my discretion, I may allow late assignments without penalty when due to circumstances beyond your control. Projects that are up to two weeks late may be accepted at a 50% grade penalty (e.g., on-time grade: 86%; late grade: 43%). Everything you turn in must be your own work--violations of the UAF Honor code will result in a minimum penalty equal to THAT ENTIRE SECTION OF YOUR GRADE (e.g., one plagiarized homework question will negate an otherwise perfect grade on all homeworks). However, even substantial reuse of other people's work is fine (and not plagiarism) if it is clearly cited; you'll be graded on what you've added to others' work. Group projects (NOT homeworks) are acceptable if you clearly label who did what work; but I do expect a two-person group project to represent twice as much work as a one-person project. Department policy does not allow tests to be taken early; but in extraordinary circumstances may be taken late.

Course Outline (Highly Tentative)

First section: Time Management

  • Hardware Implementation (Ch. 3.1)

    • System calls.

    • Resources: Stack, registers, heap

    • Protected (privileged, supervisor, "ring 0") mode kernel & security

    • Timers, and other hardware interfaces

  • Processes (Ch. 3)

    • Semantics: multiprogramming

    • Creation: UNIX fork, Win32

  • Event-driven programming

    • DOS-style polling loop

    • Mac/X (or other GUI) event loop

    • Win32 wndProc

  • Signals & interrupts (Ch. 4.4.3 & 13.2.2)

    • Hardware interrupts

    • UNIX/Win32 signals/handlers

    • Interrupt safety (reentrancy)

  • Threads (Ch. 4)

    • Kernel-level: pthreads, win32

    • User-level: coroutines

  • Concurrent Interaction (Ch. 6 & 7)

    • Motivation: Race conditions

    • Locks (pthread lock, win32 mutex), semaphores (win32)

    • Deadlock prevention

    • Not covered: deadlock detection & response

  • CPU Scheduling (Ch. 5)

    • Starvation, poor utilization

    • Work prioritization

    • Priority Inversion

    • Job scheduling: Shortest-Job-First

Second Section: Space Management

  • Memory allocation (Ch. 8.3.2)

    • Memory hierarchy & cost-capacity-speed tradeoff

    • Low-level memory allocation: sbrk

    • Mid-level memory allocators: malloc/new

  • Virtual memory: uses (Ch. 9)

    • DLL/text page sharing, copy-on-write

    • Memory-mapped files: UNIX mmap, mprotect, SYSV IPC; Win32 MapViewOfFile (Ch. 9.7)

    • Software distributed shared memory

  • Virtual memory: implementation (Ch. 8, 9.4)

    • Page table and TLB (presence, permissions, and dirty bits)

    • Demand paging & page replacement strategies

  • Filesystem (Ch. 10 & 11)

    • Layouts: File Allocation Table (FAT), inode, b-tree

    • Caching, fragmentation, corruption during crash

  • Accounting and security

    • Terminology: Tampering and authentication, secrecy and encryption

    • Common security holes: buffer overflow, unquoted inputs, excess privilege