Operating Systems Principles (CS134)

Instructor: Mark Kampe

Basic Course Information

• Instructor: Mark Kampe
• Office Hours: McGregor 304, Tue/Thu 11:00-12:00 or email any time (including Sat/Sun) to set up Zoom.
• Frequently Asked Questions

Syllabus

• Key Learning Objectives
• Primary Text
• Quizzes and Exams, sample questions
• Overview of projects
• Student presentations
• Grading weights and criteria
• Collaboration & Academic Honesty Policy

Course Resources

• Reading and Lecture Schedule
• Copies of Lecture Slides
• Zoom meeting for virtual sessions and office hours
• Piazza (access code "cs134") on-line forum for topic requests and discussions
• Gradescope website for project and exam feedback. (Entry Code: 742653)

Exams

Practical skills will be exercised in the projects. Your mastery of concepts and issues will be assessed in mid-term and final exams. The exams will be scanned to pdf and up-loaded to Gradescope for grading, and where you will be able to view the graded results.
After all exams have been confirmed to have been properly submitted solutions will available through another URL in the course schedule.

Projects and Due Dates

Projects follow quickly after the readings and lectures in which the associated principles are presented. Project deliverables are spread (relatively) uniformly throughout the course (one per week). This is done to keep you from getting in trouble when you discover that you cannot complete a three week project in two days.

Each deliverable is due a few days after the associated lab session, and most of them require you to encounter, recognize and solve one or two non-trivial problems. If you start the projects before the associated lab session, you will have already encountered the difficulties, and we can help you during the lab session. If you wait until the lab session to start a project, the session will be over before you have even encountered the real problems, and you will have to solve them on your own.

• Checking-out (or purchasing your own) Embedded Development System
• Project Due Dates (submission via Sakai Assignments)

  Projects follow quickly after the readings and lectures in which the associated principles are presented. Project deliverables are spread (relatively) uniformly throughout the course (one per week). This is done to keep you from getting in trouble when you discover that you cannot complete a three week project in two days. Each deliverable is due a few days after the associated lab session, and most of them require you to encounter, recognize and solve one or two non-trivial problems. If you start the projects before the associated lab session, you will have already encountered the difficulties, and we can help you during the lab session. If you wait until the lab session to start a project, the session may be over before you have even encountered the real problems, and you may have to solve them on your own.

  Due	Project
  Mon 1/24	P0. Warmup
  Mon 1/31	P1A. I/O and IPC
  Mon 2/7	P1B. Compressed Communication
  Mon 2/14	P4A. Embedded System Bringup
  Mon 3/07	P4B. Sensors and communication
  Mon 2/21	P2A. Mutual Exclusion
  Mon 2/28	P2B. Contention
  Mon 4/4	P3A. File System interpretation (optionally w/2 person teams)
  Mon 4/11	P3B. File System analysis (optionally w/2 person teams)
  Mon 4/25	P4C. IOT Secure communication

  Projects 2 and 3 are heavily based on the reading and lectures, and would be difficult to do before the associated material (on synchronization and file systems) has been covered. Projects 0, 4 and (to a lesser extent) 1 are much less dependent on reading and lectures and can be started at any time. You will find that, if you start each project as soon as possible, you will experience less time pressure and earn better project scores.

Student Presentations

Students will form two-person teams, choose topics generatlly related to scheduled lectures, reserach some intersting aspect of that topic, and deliver a brief in-class presenatation followed by a brief class discussion or activity.