Frequently Asked Questions

I have spent over forty-five years in the operating systems business, as a developer, architect, manager, and in a variety of staff roles. I have been very active in the development and refining of engineering tools and processes. I have always loved teaching. I teach this course because it is critical material, and I care about helping the next generation of engineers master it.

Operating Systems are among the most reliable and performance-critical software ever written. They provide the foundations for almost all applications, and many of the challenges that interesting applications face today (security, data access, parallel processing and synchronization, distributed processing, efficiency, scalability) were long ago addressed (at much greater scales) by operating systems. If you are to confront these problems, you need to study the ways that that have been solved in the evolution operating systems.

This is not a class in how to build operating systems, as that is something that very few people (of whom I am proud to be one) will ever do. Rather this is a class in which you will study:

• the ways computer architectures have evolvoed to support modern needs, and the ways that operating systems exploit those features.
• the fundamental objects that are implemented by operating systems, why they have the properties they do, and how to exploit them for your own purposes.
• major problems (e.g. resource allocation, multi-processing, scheduling, data storage, synchronization, and distributed processing) that have been addressed by operating systems, and the approaches and lessons that can be learned from them.
Why I love operating systems

General Administrative Information

Information on the course goals, contents and administrative procedures for the course can be found in the slides for the first lecture.

Lecture and Assignment Schedule

The subjects for all lectures, the reading assignments, and the dates of all exams are described in the course schedule.

Lecture Notes

Copies of lecture slides are always available on line, but you are strongly encouraged to attend the lectures.

You are free to print off and study slides for any lecture any time, but it if you print out slides well in advance of the associated lecture you should recheck them shortly before the lecture, as I try to improve lectures each time I give them.

Quizzes and Examinations

• Information on what I am testing for in quizzes and exams can be found in the syllabus.
• I do not give make-ups for quizzes. I do give make-up exams (different from the original exams, a few weeks after the end of the semester), but only in cases medical necessity (as substantiated by the physician who was treating you at the time).

The grading formula can be found in the course syllabus.

I do not grade on a curve, but I try to calibrate my assignments and standards, and the breaks usually wind up within a few points of 90/80/70/60.

I am always willing to explain why I scored an answer in a particular way, to fix arithmetic errors, and to regrade questions where I misunderstood your answer (but not where your answer was confused or you misunderstood the question). If I make a mistake in a question (making it too hard to answer correctly), I try to find a way to compensate you for my mistake. Other than that, you get the grade you earned.

I never change grades in response to excuses or hardship stories. If you need a good grade in this course, you need to earn it.