Course materials
Spring 2025
01 · Syllabus
This course studies the principles and implementation of operating systems through Linux 0.11. Topics include system calls, processes and threads, synchronization, deadlock, scheduling, memory and virtual memory, input/output, and file systems, with experiments performed on a runnable operating system.
Primary references include the Linux 0.11 kernel source, Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, and William Stallings’s Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, ninth edition. Experimental work uses VirtualBox or VMware with Ubuntu 16.04.
Students configure the experimental environment and complete three Linux 0.11 programming projects. Project teams may contain no more than three students, and each submission must document the implementation and results.
Assignments constitute 50%, exams constitute 40%, and a short essay constitutes 10% of the course grade. Standard letter-grade thresholds begin with A at 93, A− at 90, and B+ at 87.
The classroom must remain respectful and free of discrimination, bullying, and other harmful conduct. Violations are addressed through course and college procedures.
Students participate in fifteen structured study-group sessions. Groups study assigned operating-system topics, prepare explanations and demonstrations, and share their findings with the class outside regular meeting time.
AI can be a useful assistant when used reasonably, but it must not replace a student’s thinking. Assignments must be completed independently. Students should understand and be able to reproduce and explain all submitted work; significant inconsistencies may require an in-person demonstration and may be reported under academic-integrity procedures.
02 · Contents
Processor, memory, input/output, instruction execution, interrupts, the memory hierarchy, and the hardware context in which an operating system runs.
Objectives, services, resource management, evolution, architectures, protection, kernels, and the relationship between users, applications, and hardware.
The user-kernel interface, traps, system-call dispatch, parameter passing, return values, and adding testable system calls to Linux 0.11.
Process creation and termination, states, process control blocks, context switching, parent-child relationships, and execution trajectories.
Threads and processes, user- and kernel-level threading, multithreaded execution, resource sharing, responsiveness, and implementation tradeoffs.
Race conditions, critical sections, atomicity, locks, semaphores, monitors, producer-consumer coordination, and correctness requirements.
Resource allocation, the necessary conditions for deadlock, prevention, avoidance, detection, recovery, and practical tradeoffs.
Address spaces, relocation, partitioning, paging, segmentation, allocation, protection, sharing, and the operating system’s control of physical memory.
Demand paging, page faults, working sets, replacement algorithms, locality, thrashing, and the coordination of memory and secondary storage.
Scheduling goals and metrics, process selection, first-come first-served, shortest-job, priority, round-robin, and feedback strategies.
Processor affinity, load balancing, scheduling on multiple cores, synchronization costs, and approaches for parallel and real-time workloads.
Devices, controllers, interrupts, buffering, caching, spooling, disk organization, and algorithms for scheduling storage requests.
Files and directories, allocation, free-space management, access methods, metadata, permissions, mounting, and the implementation of file systems.
03 · Exam preparation
The student is expected to conduct himself, at all times, both on and off the campus, as a gentleman and a responsible citizen.
I will complete this exam in a fair, honest, respectful, responsible, and trustworthy manner. This means that I will complete the exam as if the professor was watching my every action. I will act according to the professor’s instructions, and I will neither give nor receive any aid or assistance other than what is authorized. I know that the integrity of this exam and this class is up to me, and I pledge not to take any action that would break the trust of my classmates or professor, or undermine the fairness of this class.
04 · Assignments
05 · Projects