Operating Systems Course Home

Teachers   Time and Place   Comunications    Syllabus   Bibliography    Links    Guidelines and Policies   Exercises    OS Concepts Grades: Bet 1, Bet 2   Systems Programming Grades: Bet 1, Bet 2

Teachers:

• David Talby

Reception Hour: Tuesday at 13:30 (after class), office in the second floor of the main building.

• Bodek: Ofer Kaminitz

 Time and Place:

• Operating Systems Concepts, First Semester:
  Class Bet 1 at Sunday 17:30 - 20:00 at room 37
  Class Bet 2: Sunday 14:30 - 17:00 at room 24.
  
• Systems Programming, Second Semester:
  Class Bet 1 at Sunday 11:00-13:30 at room 24, and Tuesday 10:00-11:30 at room 37.
  Class Bet 2 at Sunday 8:00-10:30 at room 20, and Tuesday 12:00-13:30 at room 24.

 Comunications:

Discussion Group: http://talkitover.com/elizabeth/luxembourg

The discussion group is only used for publishing information that might interest ALL students!
This is the place to ask questions about the course material, or to clarify a question in an exercise that you don't understand. Discussion groups become more useful the more you use them, so it's up to you. Also, feel free to answer other people's questions and suggestions in the newsgroup, without waiting for Ofer or David to answer everything.
The newsgroup will also be the place where announcements such as checked exercises and postponements will be posted. Posted messages will be assumed known to everyone! Therefore, remember:

  It is YOUR responsibility to check the discussion group once in a while.

Emails:

• David Talby: davidt@cs.huji.ac.il
• Ofer Kaminitz: oferka@netvision.net.il

Q: Okay, so what do we need the emails for if we have a newsgroup?
A: For personal questions only - ones that the entire class shouldn't or needn't know of. If you would like to request a postponement for an exercise, or if you wish to appeal ("Irur") about an exercise grade, mail Ofer directly. Any other personal questions should be mailed to David.

 Syllabus:

The course of the first semester will be a theoretical one, and will cover these issues:

• Introduction: The role of the OS, the hardware connection
• Processes: Internal Representation, Creation, IPC
• Short-Term Scheduling
• Queue Theory: Basic statistics behind schedulers
• Inter-Process Synchronization: Critical Sections, Semaphores and others
• Deadlocks: Prevention, Avoidence and Detection
• Memory Management: Hyrarchy, Paging, Segmentation
• Virtual Memory: The hardware connection
• I/O Devices and Secondary Storage Management
• File Systems
• Distributed Systems: Motivation, OSI seven layers model
• Distributed Algorithms: Snapshot, Timestamping, Mutual Exclusion, Deadlocks
• Security and Protection

The second semester will concentrate on practice - system programming in Unix. The subjects:

• The Unix kernel architecture.
• File system: Regular files, symbolic links and directories. The associated system calls.
• File system implementation: Partitions, i-nodes and disk blocks, runtime data structures.
• Processes: Creation, execution and termination
• Signals: Common types, handlers, blocking, alarms
• Short-term scheduler implementation
• Memory management: Swapping and swapper process, virtual memory and the page daemon
• Allocating user memory: Allocation map, powers-of-2 and the buddy system
• Inter-process communication: Pipes, Fifos, the select system call, memory mapped files
• TCP/IP Sockets
• Security: The superuser, authentication, encryption, the Kerberos system

 Bibliography:

The books for the first semester (theory):

• Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, by William Stallings, 3rd edition
• Operating System Concepts, by Silberschatz and Galvin
• Many other introductory books about operating systems exist, and most of them cover almost the same set of subjects. So if you find a book that you like, do use it, and recommend it in the discussion group.

The books for the second semester (practice):

• The Design of the Unix Operating System, by Maurice S. Bach
• Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, by Richard Stevens
• Advanced Unix Programming, by Marc J. Rochkind
• Many other books describing Unix and NT in detail exist; any good reference of Unix's system calls will be useful.

Material handed out in class:

• Summary of Unix System Calls for Files and I/O, in HTML and Word formats.
• Summary of Unix System Calls for Process handling, signals and pipes, in HTML and Word formats.
• Summary of Unix System Calls for Inter-Process Communication, in HTML and Word formats.
• An example of a simple client/server program based on sockets, in Word or as server.c and client.c.

Tests:

• Operating Systems Concepts 1999: Example test, Moed Alef, Moed Bet
• System Programming (Unix) 1999: Example test, Moed Alef

Links:

Theoretical Material:

• The OS course homepage in the Hebrew University includes a set of well written notes that covers a substantial part of the first semester course, that were written by Dr. Dror Feitelson.
• Ben Gurion University's slides cover processes and scheduling, file systems and I/O drivers.

C language references:

• C Reference
• C Standard Library
• Yet Another C Tutorial
• Recommended C Style and Coding Standards
• First Lecture on C
• Pointers and Arrays in C/C++

Unix/Linux references:

• Basic Unix Development Tools
• Make Guide
• Coping with UNIX - An Interactive Surviaval Guide
• Linux Documentation

Other useful links:

• Riddle collection (finally here!)
• A list of providers of free email and home pages.
• For exercise zero, you can get help with basic HTML.
• BABEL: A Glossary of Computer Oriented Abbreviations and Acronyms

 Guidelines and Policies

The theoretical course will have weekly exercises, worth 15% of the final grade, and a final test that will determine the remaining 85%. In order to pass the course, all except one of the exercises must be submitted.

The practical course will have bi-weekly exercises, worth 30% of the final grade, and a final test that will determine the remaining 70%. In order to pass the course, all exercises must be submitted.

Read carefully the exercise guidelines for the second semester.

You are encouraged to submit in pairs.

Do the exercises yourselves. Need we say more?

 Exercises:

All exercise descriptions and solutions will be available from here, so if you missed a class you can download them from here.

First semester exercises (grades of checked exercises for Bet 1 and Bet 2 are here) are in Hebrew Word '97 format:

Second semester exercises (grades for Bet 1 and Bet 2 are here) are in HTML format:

and the most important thing is to take this course easy.