CS 520: Operating Systems

Prof. Quynh Dinh
Wednesdays 6:15-8:45pm, Morton 205.
Office Hours: Wednesdays 3:30pm-4:30pm, Lieb Building rm.216. All other times by appointment.

TA: Wei Jiang (wjiang1@stevens.edu)
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 3pm-5pm Lieb 212 Computer Vision Lab. All other times by appointment.

Prerequisites

• CS 383 or CS 550 Computer Organization and Programming
• CS 385 or CS 590 Advanced Data Structures and Algorithms

Text

Required

• Modern Operating Systems, 2nd Ed., by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, ISBN 0-13-031358-0

Grading Policy

Assignment Breakdown

• Projects 52% (3 projects worth 14%, 1 project worth 10%)
• Presentation 10%
• Midterm 18%
• Final 20%

Submission Policy

All assignments are due at 11:55pm on the due date. Assignments are to be submitted using WebCT (Elearning). Login using your Stevens Pipeline account which should have been created for you upon enrollment.

Late Policy

For each assignment, you can submit the assignment up to one week late, but no later. 10 points (out of 100) will be taken off for each day that an assignment is turned in late. In other words, 10 points will be taken off if the assignment is turned in before 11:55pm the day after the due date, and so on. Assignments may be turned in late up to 5 days after the due date/time.

Collaboration

Please see policy on collaboration.

Syllabus

Warning: The links below are to MS Powerpoint slides which can augment your notes. These slides do not completely cover topics discussed in class or in reading assignments. Solutions to exam questions and programming assignments may not appear in the slides.

• Introduction to OS
• System Calls and Processes
• Monitors, Message Passing, RPC
• Scheduling
• Deadlocks
• Memory Management
• Virtual Memory
• Midterm Review
• Virtual Memory Paging
• Virtual Memory Paging Continued
• Memory Segmentation
• Device Controllers
• I/O Software
• Unix Device I/O
• Disks and Network Terminals
• File Systems
• File Systems continued
• More File Systems
• Sample File Systems
• System Security
• Special Guest Lecture on Security Basics

The following is a tentative schedule and is subject to change.

Lecture	Date	Topic	Assignment
1	Aug. 27	Introduction, System Calls, Processes, Threads, Interprocess Communication, Critical Section, Mutual Exclusion, Producer-Consumer, Hardware-enabled Locking, Semaphores	Ch.1, Ch.2.1-2.4, p.864-866
2	Sept. 3	Mutexes, Monitors, Message Passing, Remote Procedure Call (RPC), Scheduling, Deadlocks	Ch.8.2.3-8.2.4, Ch.2.5, Ch.3, Assignment 1
3	Sept. 10	Scheduling, Deadlocks	Ch.3
4	Sept. 17	Memory Management, Swapping, Variable Partitions, 2 student presentations (process communication and scheduling)
5	Sept. 24	Virtual Memory, Paging, Page Replacement Strategies	Ch.4.1-4.32, Assignment 1 due
6	Oct. 1	Page Allocation, Page Size, Page Faults, Backing Store, Memory Segmentation, 2 student presentations (process communication and scheduling)	Ch.4.4-4.8, Assignment 2
7	Oct. 8	File Systems, 2 student presentations (memory management)
8	Oct. 15	File System Implementation, 2 student presentations (memory management)	Ch.6.1-Ch.6.2, Ch.6.3.1, 6.3.2, 6.3.5, 6.3.6 (file system consistency), 6.3.7
9	Oct. 22	Midterm (sample midterm questions - note actual exam will be longer!), Device I/O	Assignment 2 due, Assignment 3 assigned
10	Oct. 29	2 student presentations (file systems, device I/O), I/O, Devices, Device Drivers, Plug-n-Play, Streams	Ch.5.1-5.4, 5.6, 5.8, Ch.10.5.3-10.5.4, Ch.11.6.4
11	Nov. 5	Disks, 3 student presentations (file systems, device I/O)
12	Nov. 12	Disks, Network Terminals, 2 student presentations (file systems, device I/O)	Ch.5.8, Assignment 3 due
13	Nov. 19	OS Security Issues, 2 student presentations (security)	Ch.6.4.2-6.4.5, Ch.10.6.3, Ch.11.7 (up to 11.7.3 File Compression), Assignment 4
14	Nov. 26	NO CLASSES - Thanksgiving Recess
15	Dec. 3	3 student presentations (security)	Assignment 4 due
16	Dec 10	Final Exam

You must team up with one other person to decide on a presentation topic. Presentations are to be 30 mins. long (approximately 15 mins. for each person). Dates and topics are first-come-first-serve: Presentation Schedule

Suggested topics:

• Evolution of either process, memory, device, or security management for one the following OSes and its variants
  
  • MacOS - LisaOS, System 6, System 7, transitional features in Mac OS 9 related to your topic that helped Apple transition to Mac OS X which is a merger with Unix, features of Mac OS X that differs from Unix in the area that you are covering
  • Unix variants - Linux (Ext2, Ext3), BSD familty (Free,Net,OpenBSD), System III and System V family (HP-UX, AIX, IRIX), Solaris
  • Windows variants - Win3.0, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows Vista
  • NeXTSTEP
  • BeOS
  • WinCE
  • PalmOS
• Compare and contrast file systems - e.g., Reiser vs. NTFS

Samples:

• Unix memory management
• Windows device management

Past presentation topics:

• VxWorks
• IOS
• Multi-CPU Load Balancing
• Hyperthreads
• Linux Process Scheduling
• MacOS Memory Management
• Palm OS Memory Management
• Virtualization
• Distributed File Systems
• Journaling File Systems
• Linux Device Drivers
• Windows Vista Device Management
• NetBSD Security Management

Equipment and Facilities

You will be using C or C++ under Unix (netBSD machines or guinness). Burchard 127 has Unix terminals availabel for CS students. You may develop and debug all your code on any machine you like, but before you submit your homework make sure it compiles and runs on NetBSD. If you don't already have a computer account, make sure you get one, by contacting the CS system administrator.

Resources

• Sample NetBSD Makefile
• SSH telnet client
• Putty client
• FileZilla secure FTP