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

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