CS385 - Operating System Concepts and Design

This is the course website for CS385spring11 of Spring 2011. Please see the Syllabus for initial course details.

Midterm contents

Midterm date: March 2

The midterm covers all the material discussed in the course so far. This includes, but does not consist entirely of:

• general ideas from chapters 1 and 2
• chapters 3, 4, 6 and 7
• C programming - pointers, arrays, type casting, structs
• low-level representation of function calls (parameter passing, stack layout etc)
• linking, loading, object files (.o), library files (.a), dynamically loaded libraries (.so)
• memory allocation with malloc() and free(), and their underlying implementation (using sbrk())
• process and thread concepts
• multithreaded programming with pthreads
• mutex, condition variables and barriers with pthreads
• multi-process programming with fork(), execve(), dup2() and wait/waitpid()
• basic process scheduling (how it is done in general, not the design of different process schedulers)

Additional reference materials

• Introduction to C through annotated examples great reference.
• Introduction to Concurrency in Unix-based GNU C through annotated examples another great reference by the same author.
• An in-depth description and analysis of the Linux CPU scheduler.

Homework Schedule

Topic	Due 3:30 pm on Tue	Points
1 - types and expressions	1/18	5
2 - functions and memory management	1/25	5
3 - data structures in C	2/1	5
4 - homebrew command line interpreter	2/8	5
5 - elevator controller (thread synchronization)	2/15	5
6 - elevator controller (scheduling)	3/1	10
Midterm 1	3/2	20
7 - an inter-process messaging library	3/15	10
8 - DIY memory allocator	3/29	15
9 - Homebrew file system (read-only)	4/13	10
10 - Homebrew file system (rw and improved)	4/28	15