CSE 451

Goals of the Course

• To cover the traditional topics: What is an Operating System and what is it supposed to do for us? How does it accomplish these functions? How are such systems implemented and structured?
• To help you develop new skills: Concurrent programming.  Developing an intuition for system design tradeoffs.

Textbooks

Operating System Concepts (5th Edition) by Silberschatz and Galvin

Also known as "the dinosaur book". Currently available in the bookstore. This is a new edition. Previous editions have been used in the past and are still OK to use this term, so you may be able to pick up a used book without a lot of trouble. Just do a "sanity check" comparison on the numbering of exercises assigned from the new book to catch any critical changes.

You might also want to pick up a book on Java that suits your tastes.

Grading

• Programs (Java)       30%
• Paper Homework    10%
• Midterm                   20% (in-class, open book, Monday May 3, 9:30-10:20)
• Final Exam               40% (Wed. June 9, 8:30-10:20)

Topic Outline

• Introduction: (Chap 1-3)

OS types, OS structures, architectural support
• Processes and Threads: (Chap 4)

process model and states, PCBs, OS queues, threads, operations on processes and threads, scheduling
• Synchronization and Communications: (Chap 6)

critical section problem, semaphores and their implementations, monitors, message passing, non-deterministic communications, rendezvous; standard problems: bounded buffer and producer-consumer, readers-writers, dining philosophers
• CPU Scheduling: (Chap 5)

round-robin, FIFO, SJF, preemptive, static and dynamic priority, priority inversion, inheritance protocol
• Deadlock: (Chap 7)

examples of deadlock, process-resource model, prevention methods, avoidance, bankers algorithm, detection and recovery
• Main Storage Management: (Chap 8-9)

linking and loading, contiguous allocation schemes, virtual memories; paging systems: demand paging, fault processing, replacement; segmentation, combined methods
• File Systems and IO Processing:(Chap 10-12)

logical structure of a file system, file and directory interfaces, logical and physical organizations, secondary storage allocation, disk scheduling, IO subsystems, device drivers
• Protection and Security: (Chap 19-20)

internal and external threats, access list and capability-based protection, cryptography
• Case Studies: (Chap 21, 23)

Unix, Mach, OS/2, NT

Policies

• Late Work

Please don't even consider turning stuff in late. Barring exceptional (extreme) circumstances, we will not accept late turnins and will not consider granting Incompletes as a grade.
 
• The Reasonable Person Principle

This principle (which applies throughout this course) simply states that a reasonable request made in a reasonable fashion shall be reasonably handled by reasonable persons. The TAs and I are reasonable people, and we expect that everyone else involved in this class is as well.