Course Overview

Overview

Welcome to your first course in operating systems! (well, hopefully your first course) This course will introduce you to an exciting range of materials from the broad field of operating systems, including basic operating system structure, process and thread synchronization and concurrency, file systems and storage servers, memory management techniques, process scheduling and resource management, virtualization, security, and even distributed systems.

This course assumes familiarity with basic computer organization (e.g., processors, memory, and I/O devices as covered in CS354) and data structures (e.g., stacks and hash tables as covered in CS367). You will need to be able to program in C (not C++, not Java, not Python, not Javascript, not Ruby, etc.) to perform the projects in the course. If you don't have much experience in this language, don't worry (too much), we will spend some time covering background, but of course, learning on your own is important and valuable (in this class and in real life). For those of you who are new to C (e.g., you just know Java), realize this is an opportunity to broaden your skill set, and take it seriously. Being a good programmer is not sufficient to make you a good computer scientist, but it is necessary.

Materials

For learning about operating systems, we recommend coming to class and paying attention. Then, some time after class, read the assigned reading. This way you can make sure you are understanding what is going on as we plow through the material.

For an OS text book, we provide you with a free one that Remzi and Andrea developed here at Wisconsin. Here you can find the free operating systems book . The book pretty much covers what we talk about in class, and more! All yours for the amazing price of free.

For help with projects, you should probably buy the following two books. They are awesome and useful. The first is about C programming, written by the people who invented it. This is the only required book for the course.

The second is about programming in the Unix environment, and is the absolute bible. It is particularly important if you'd like to become a Unix expert. But this is more for your own good; you can definitely get by in class without it.

• The C Programming Language (2nd ed.)
• Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment (2nd ed.)

Also useful: Expert C Programming by Peter Van der Linden. I really like this book a lot (though it is a bit dated). There is also a free resource on learning to program in C by Zed Shaw. It is called Learning C the Hard Way. For those of you looking for some exercises on getting up to speed with C, this is a reasonable way of doing so.

You might also read this short, free, and incomplete introduction to the C programming environment, available for your viewing convenience off of the book home page here.

Other textbooks worth taking a look at: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) . Also: (1) (2) . Read these too if you'd like to learn more about operating systems. The more you read (and understand), the better off you will be (this is true in life too).

Mailing Lists

Important announcements will be sent to the class mailing list
(compsci537-2-f17@lists.wisc.edu) as well as posted to the web page, so please read your mail frequently (particularly around project time)! You are responsible for the material sent to that list. Note that the class list is automatically generated based on who is enrolled in the class.

Worksheets

Worksheets are worth 10% of your grade. There will be one worksheet handed out per week. These worksheets will be helpful in testing yourself to see if you really understand what is going on in class. Also, these worksheets will help you to better prepare for the exams since some exam questions may be very similar to these worksheets.

Projects

As part of the course, you will complete a number of programming projects. Project are worth 50% of your grade. You should perform these projects on departmental PCs running the Linux operating system.

The projects are a fundamental part of this course. Most projects require a significant amount of time; do not procrastinate! It is likely they will take longer than you expect. Do not wait until the day before the project is due to start. These projects should be started pretty much when they are handed out. All information necessary to complete the projects will be available from the class web page.

As stated above, all of the projects will be in C. We assume that you have enough programming background that learning the basics of a new language (if it is indeed new to you) will not be difficult.

For the projects, you will primarily be graded on how well your implementation works. We will test your program on a suite of input sets. Your grade will be based on how many of the tests your application passes; we will only briefly examine your code to ensure that you followed the specifications of the project.

Also, don't cheat (duh). Cheating hurts others and hurts yourself. Later in life, you won't be able to take other people's code to do your job; why do it now?

Exams

There will be some exams to test your knowledge. Exams are worth 40% of your final grade. The exams will be closed book, and will cover material from class and the projects.

Exam Schedule:

• Midterm Exam: Friday, October 20^th @ 5:30pm - 7:30pm in TBD
• Final Exam: Friday, December 15^th @ 7:25pm - 9:25pm in TBD