Operating Systems - CSCI 402, Fall 2015, All Sections

Operating Systems - CSCI 402, Fall 2015, All Sections

Click here to see a PREVIEW of important rules.

This is an undergraduate course on computer operating systems. (Although this course is for graduate students! USC undergraduate students must take CS 350 in order to get credit for OS. If you are an undergraduate student, you cannnot be in this class!) In addition to exploring concepts such as synchronization, virtual memory, processes, file systems and virtualization, students will develop elements of a fairly complete operating system during the course of the semester.

General Information

Instructor

Bill Cheng (click to see office hours)
E-mail: <bill.cheng@usc.edu>. (Please do not send HTML-only e-mails. They will not be read.)

DEN Section (29945D+29946D)

PM Section (30243D)

TT Section (30203D)

Time

MW 10:00am - 11:20am (NEW)

MW 12:25pm - 1:45pm (NEW)

TT 9:30am - 10:50am

Location

OHE 122

SLH 102

Sung-Han Lin, E-mail: <sunghan@usc.edu>
Office Hours: Tue/Thu 1:00pm - 2:00pm in SAL open lab (in front of SAL 126)

Muhammad Rizwan Saeed, E-mail: <saeedm@usc.edu>
Office Hours: Mon 11:00am - 12:00pm and Thu 4:00pm - 5:00pm in EEB 226

Course Producers

Damini Harnathka <harnathk@usc.edu>, Helpdesk Hours: Wed 10:00am - 12:00pm, Fri 6:00pm - 8:00pm in SAL open lab (in front of SAL 126)

Ankush Prasad <ahprasad@usc.edu>, Helpdesk Hours: Mon 6:00pm - 8:00pm, Tue 2:00pm - 4:00pm in SAL open lab (in front of SAL 126)

Surabhi Raje <surabhir@usc.edu>, Helpdesk Hours: Wed 12:00pm - 2:00pm, Thu 6:00pm - 8:00pm in SAL open lab (in front of SAL 126)

Graders

Le Zhuang, E-mail: <lezhuang@usc.edu>

Prashanth Shetty, E-mail: <pgshetty@usc.edu>

Bharath Prabhu Perdoor, E-mail: <perdoor@usc.edu>

(The grader will hold office hours the week after the announcement of each assignment's grades.)

Midterm Exam

during class time, Wed, 10/28/2015 (firm)

during class time, Thu, 10/29/2015 (firm)

Final Exam

8am-10am, Mon, 12/14/2015 (firm).

11am-1pm, Fri, 12/11/2015 (firm).

11am-1pm, Thu, 12/10/2015 (firm).

Class Resources

Description	:	textbooks, topics covered, grading policies, additional resources, etc.
Lectures	:	information about lectures (and lectures slides in PDF format).
Videos	:	information about DEN lectures and discussion sections videos.
Discussions	:	information about discussion sections.
Projects	:	programming assignments (please also see important information about the class projects below.)
Participation	:	rules about roll calls.
Newsgroup	:	Google Group for discussing course materials and programming assignments. You are required to be a member of this group. (This group is by invitation only.) Please note that this Google Group currently does not exist. It will be created after the first lecture.

News

(in reversed chronological order)

12/4/2015: The final exam will be closed book, closed notes, and closed everything (and no "cheat sheet"). Also, no calculators, cell phones, or any electronic gadgets are allowed. Please bring a photo ID. Your ID will be collected at the beginning of the exam and will be returned to you when you turn in your exam. There will be assigned seating.
The final exam will cover everything from slide 4 of Lecture 17 on on 10/19&20/2015 to the last slide of Lecture 31 on 12/4/2015 (including the discussion section slides), PLUS anything about Ch 5 in lectures 13, 14 and 15.
Regarding what types of questions will be on the exam, please see the Exams section of the course description web page. Regarding regrade policy, please see the Regrade section of the course description web page.
Please note that if you are asked to run the Stride Scheduling algorithm, to get any credit, you must run the one described in Lecture 30 (and not from the textbook).
Here is a quick summary of the topics (not all topics covered may be listed):
- Ch 3 - Basic Concepts
  - shared libraries
- Ch 4 - Operating-System Design
  - devices
  - virtual machines, microkernels
- Ch 5 - Processor Management
  - threads implementations
  - interrupts
  - scheduling
- Ch 6 - File Systems
  - the basics of file systems
  - performance improvements
  - crash resiliency
  - directories and naming
  - RAID, flash memory, case studies
- Ch 7 - Memory Management
  - virtual memory
  - OS issues
- Kernel assignments 2 & 3

12/2/2015: Change the definition of a "job" on slide 14 of Lecture 29. (The slide was correct, but I need to modify what I said on Lecture 29.) If a thread gives up the CPU voluntarily, when it comes back to the run queue, it's treated as a different "job". If the scheduler decides to remove the thread from the CPU and put it back into the run queue, it's still the same "job". (The wait time of a job is still the amount of time that job spends in the run queue plus the amount of time that job spends in the CPU.)
I will talk about this at the beginning of Lecture 30.

12/1/2015: To make up for Thanksgiving holiday, I will lecture during discussion section on DEN this Friday (followed by a Q&A sesson, if there is time).
The other two discussion sections are Q&A only. If no one is asking questions after 10 minutes into class, the TA will end the discussion section.
There will be no roll sheet to sign this Friday. Everyone gets 1 point credit for free.

11/30/2015: Kernel 3 grading guideline change (so forkbomb and stress are easier to pass)! When you run forkbomb or stress, please use DBG=error,temp,print,test,testpass,testfail in Config.mk. The change affects (D.4), (D.5), (E.4), and (E.5).

11/28/2015: Kernel 3 grading guideline change! Please change the 2nd item in (A.6.d) from:

    (1 pt) (postondition when returning 0) KASSERT((o == (*pf)->pf_obj) && (pagenum == (*pf)->pf_pagenum) && (!pframe_is_busy(*pf)));

    (1 pt) (postondition when returning 0) KASSERT((pagenum == (*pf)->pf_pagenum) && (!pframe_is_busy(*pf)));

11/16/2015: Eddie Partida from the Claremont Colleges STEM Initiative will be on campus tomorrow to talk to students who are interested in becoming a math or science teacher. If you are interested, here's the information:
Who should attend: STEM majors/grad students interested in becoming teachers
When: Tuesday, Nov 17, 2015
Time: 12:00PM - 1:30PM (drop-ins welcome!)
Location: Student Union Building, Room B-1
Questions: <information@cgu.edu>
Here is a flyer (in PDF) about the initiative.

10/20/2015: The midterm exam will be closed book, closed notes, and closed everything (and no "cheat sheet"). Also, no calculators, cell phones, or any electronic gadgets are allowed. Please bring a photo ID. Your ID will be collected at the beginning of the exam and will be returned to you when you turn in your exam. There will be assigned seating.
The midterm exam will cover everything from the beginning of the semester to slide 3 of Lecture 17 on 10/19&20/2015, MINUS Chapter 5 (i.e., material in Ch 5 is excluded from the midterm).
Regarding what types of questions will be on the midterm, please see the Exams section of the course description web page. Regarding regrade policy, please see the Regrade section of the course description web page.
Here is a quick summary of the topics (not all topics covered may be listed):
- Ch 1 - Introduction
  - introduction
  - a simple OS
  - files
- Ch 2 - Multithreaded Programming
  - thread creation, termination, synchronization
  - thread safety, deviations
- Ch 3 - Basic Concepts
  - context switching, I/O
  - dynamic storage allocation
  - static linking and loading
  - booting
- Ch 4 - Operating-System Design
  - a simple system
  - storage management
- Warmup assignments 1 & 2
  - specs
  - FAQs
  - my posts to class Google Group
- Kernel assignment 1
  - spec
  - FAQ
  - my posts to class Google Group

10/1/2015: Today's office hour is extended to 2pm.

9/30/2015: Today's office hour is extended to 4pm.

9/25/2015: Surabhi Raje's helpdesk hour today (2-4pm) is canceled and moved to 3:30-5:30pm next Wednesday (9/30/2015). Sorry about the inconvenience.

9/24/2015: Rizwan's office hour hour today (4-5pm) is canceled and moved to 4-5pm tomorrow (Fri, 9/25/2015). Sorry about the inconvenience.

9/11/2015: I'm forwarding a recruiting event announcement from EY (previously Ernst & Young). They are one of the largest accounting firm in the US and they do more than just accounting. They have a presentation on campus next Thursday (9/17/2015). If you are interested, please see their flyer for details.

8/20/2015:
- In case you did not hear the user ID and password for accessing protected area of this web site during the first lecture, please visit the request access page after semester starts and submit the requested information. (You do not have to be registered for the course to get the password. You just need to have an USC e-mail address.)
- Please do not send request to join the class Google Group until 8/26/2015.
- Although CSCI 402 is an undergraduate course, these sections are for graduate students only. If you are an ungraduate student, please check with your adviser to see which Operating System class you need to take.
- Please make sure you attend the section for which you are registered. Click here to see a PREVIEW of important rules. (It would be best if you are familiar with these rules before you register for a particular section of this class. If you are registered in the wrong section, it's best if you switch to the right section NOW because I will not change any of the important rules.)
- Watch this area for important announcements.

Prerequisites

In the official syllabus, it is listed that the prerequisites are:

(CSCI 201L or CSCI 455x) and (EE 357 or EE 352L)
Please see:

CSci 201L (Principles of Software Development) or CSci 455x (Introduction to Programming Systems Design).
EE 357 (Basic Organization of Computer Systems) or EE 352L (Computer Organization and Architecture).

Apparently, they are the prerequisites for undergraduate students only. The CS department would waive these prerequisites for graduate students. Since undergraduate students are required to take CS 350 for OS credit, there should only be graduate students enrolled in CS 402. Therefore, these prerequisites are really not prerequisites. They should be considered recommended preparation for graduate students. The basic idea behind these prerequisites is that you are expected to know how to program and you are expected to know something about computer architecture (such as what the CPU does).

Important Information about Programming Assignments

The programming assignments of this class will be very demanding. You will be required to write C code. Since C is a proper subset of C++, knowing C++ well would give you enough background. However, some of the things that available in C++, such as strings and streams, are not be available in C. So, you need to know how to do things such as manipulating null-terminated array of characters (using functions such as strchr, strrchr, strlen, strcmp, strncpy, etc.) and performing console and file I/O (using functions such as printf/snprintf, fread/fwrite, read/write, fgets, etc.) in C. No other programming language will be accepted. We will not teach C in this class. You are expected to pick up C on your own if you are not familiar with it.

You should also get familiar with the Unix development environment (vi/pico/emacs, cc/gcc, make, etc.) You are expected to know how to use Unix. If you are not familiar with Unix, please read Unix for the Beginning Mage, a tutorial written by Joe Topjian. The kernel programming assignments must run on Ubuntu 12.04. Therefore, you should install Ubuntu 12.04 on your laptop or desktop, if you have one. If you do not have a personal laptop or desktop that runs Windows or Mac OS X, please contact the instructor as soon as possible.

If a student signs up late for this class or could not be present at the beginning of the semester, he/she is still required to turn all projects and homeworks on time or he/she will receive a score of 0 for these assignments. No exceptions!