COMS 352: Introduction to Operating Systems
Department of Computer Science
Iowa State University

• Course Information
• Instructor and TAs
• Course Syllabus
• Grading Policy
• Homeworks
• Projects
• Academic Honesty
• Late Policy
• Exams
• Accommodation of Disabilities
• Electronic Submission
• ********** Grades **********
• OLD Course Notes (slides) (OLD, use for reference only)

Course Information

Instructor and TAs

Instructor: Dimitris Margaritis
Office: Atanasoff 103
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays 4-5 (or make an appointment by email or come by the office).
Voice: (515) 294-8052
Email:

Teaching Assistant: TBA
Office: TBA
Office hours: TBA
Email: TBA

Course Syllabus

The course will cover the following topics, either completely or partially, as time permits. These may be presented in a slightly different order than the one listed below.

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Operating-System Structures
• Chapter 3: Processes
• Chapter 4: Threads
• Chapter 5: CPU Scheduling
• Pthreads
• Chapter 6: Process Synchronization
• Chapter 7: Deadlocks
• Chapter 8: Main Memory Management
• Chapter 9: Virtual Memory
• Sockets
• Chapter 16: Distributed Systems Structures
• Chapter 10: File-System Interface
• Chapter 11: File-System Implementation
• Chapter 12: Mass-Storage Structure
• Chapter 13: I/O Systems
• Chapter 17: Distributed File Systems
• Chapter 14: Protection
• Chapter 15: Security

Grading Policy

Your final grade in this course will be based on homeworks, programming projects, and exams. These will be weighted as follows.

• 25% Homeworks
• 35% Projects
• 20% Midterm exams
• 20% Final exam

You are guaranteed to receive the highest applicable letter grade based on the following scale.

• 94% and higher: A
• 89% and higher: A-
• 85% and higher: B+
• 81% and higher: B
• 77% and higher: B-
• 73% and higher: C+
• 68% and higher: C
• 64% and higher: C-
• 60% and higher: D+
• 55% and higher: D
• 50% and higher: D-

The instructor reserves the right to raise grades. For example, if your final grade is 83%, you are guaranteed to receive at least a B, but you may receive a B+.

Graders will email scores for homeworks, projects, and exams to students. Grades may be appealed for ONE WEEK after they are emailed except the final exam whose grade will be emailed by request only. After the appeal period has expired, grade change requests will be denied.

Homeworks

Homework assignments will be due on Monday of each week (unless stated otherwise), and will be discussed during recitation. ALL homework must be turned in electronically (see the section on electronic submission). Written work must be submitted as plain ASCII text. The graders must be able to view your homework using a text editor such as vi, emacs, or pico. Word or WordPerfect files will not be accepted!

Homework 0 must be completed before any other electronic submission is accepted.

Homeworks out:

• None yet.

Projects

There will be three programming projects for this course. The following applies to all projects.

• Projects must be turned in electronically (see the section on electronic submission) by submitting all necessary source code.
• Source code must include proper documentation to receive full credit.
• All projects require the use of makefiles. Graders must be able to build your executables by simply typing make. For more information on the tool make, see the online manual.
• Projects may require the use of system calls that are not 100% portable. You are free to develop source code on your own system; however, it is your responsibility to ensure that your submitted code works correctly on the machines used by the graders. Your source code MUST compile and run correctly on the machine pyrite. This is the machine that will be used by the graders.
• Programs that do not compile may receive zero points!
• Project statements will provide specifications; however, many implementation-specific details will not be specified. You are ultimately responsible for resolving these design issues.
• You are responsible for thoroughly testing and debugging your code. Samples given in the project descriptions are for illustration only; graders will try to break your code by subjecting it to bizarre test cases.

Projects out:

• None yet.

Academic Honesty

Homework assignments and projects are individual efforts, not group efforts. While discussion of assignments with other students is encouraged, a level of discussion that produces identical work is prohibited. When discussing code with other students, you may

• discuss algorithms, data structures, and implementation strategies.
• discuss the specifics of system calls (the meaning of the parameters, etc.).
• assist in debugging, possibly by suggesting diagnostic print statements.
• copy code given out in class.

It is expected that you have written EVERY LINE OF CODE that you submit (with the exception of code given out in class). The following are examples of activities that are PROHIBITED:

• Writing code with another student.
• Copying code from another student.
• Giving code to another student (via email, printouts, etc).
• Posting code in a publicly accessible location.

Such activities will result in zero points awarded for the assignment and a formal charge of Academic Dishonesty through the Dean of Students' Office (see the University's Academic Dishonesty Policy for details).

Late Policy

Programming projects and homework assignments will be penalized 1% per hour past the deadline. For instance, if you turn in a project 6 hours late, your grade will be multiplied by 0.94. Homework assignments will not be accepted after Thursday at noon. Programming projects more than 100 hours late will be assigned a grade of zero points.

Coupons

Each student will be given three coupons for projects only. You can think of each coupon as a personal due-date extension good for one day. For instance, you can choose to do one of the following (only one, not all!):

• Submit one project three days late.
• Submit one project two days late and one project one day late.
• Submit one project one day late, another project one day late and yet another one one day late.

• Coupons are non-transferable.
• Coupons must be used in one-day increments.
• Coupons may only be applied to projects.
• Coupons can be used by either submitting a file named COUPON (or COUPON1, COUPON2 etc if using multiple coupons), together with your source code.
• You must submit the COUPON file(s) together with your source code i.e., you must include it together with your last submission of the code. If you had included the file in a previous submission but not the last one, the TA has no way of knowing that you want to use a coupon, because old submissions are automatically overwritten.

Use your coupons wisely, because additional coupons will not be awarded except under extreme circumstances.

Exams

There will be two midterm exams and one final exam. Midterm exams will be one-hour, in-class exams. The tentative exam schedule is the beginning of October for Midterm 1, which will cover Chapters 1-5. Midterm 2 will be around the beginning to middle of November, and will cover Chapters 6-8. The final exam will be given according to the University schedule (Wednesday, December 17, 7:30-9:30 am currently), and will cover the remaining material in depth and general concepts from the midterms.

All exams will be closed book and closed notes. Please bring a photo ID with you to each exam. To reschedule an exam or for special considerations, please contact the instructor at least one week prior to the exam date. Missed exams will not be re-offered except under extreme circumstances.

Accommodation of Disabilities

If you have a disability and anticipate needing accommodations in this course, please contact the instructor within the first two weeks of the semester. Before meeting with the instructor, you will need to obtain a SAAR form with recommendations for accommodations from the Disability Resources Office, located in Room 1076 on the main floor of the Student Services Building. Their telephone number is 515-294-7220.

Electronic Submission

All homework assignments and programming projects must be turned in electronically, using a script called turnin. The script is invoked by calling

  ~cs352/bin/turnin Assignment

(You may create an alias to reduce your typing requirements.) The script copies everything within your current working directory to a directory named Assignment in the TA's grading account. Note that the script must be invoked from one of the Red Hat PCs (e.g., popeye). Use caution when submitting an assignment: if you turn in the same assignment more than once, your previous submission will be erased. You should receive email confirmation of your submitted files. If you don't, or if you receive an email without mentioning your files, there was a problem with the submission. A common problem is too little disk quota in your account (the turnin script uses some temporary space in your account and will fail if there is not enough space).

An example

This example assumes that the script has been aliased, by adding the following line to your .cshrc file, assuming that your shell is the tcsh shell.

  alias turnin352 ~cs352/bin/turnin

1. Copy the files you want to submit to a temporary directory
   

         mkdir tmp
         cd tmp
         cp ~/proj1/makefile ~/proj1/*.c ~/proj1/*.h .
       

   To use a coupon for the project:
   

         touch COUPON
       

   (To use two coupons you would have typed: touch COUPON1 COUPON2)


2. Execute the turnin script
   

         turnin352 Project1
       

3. Wait for email confirmation
   You should receive a message similar to the following.
   

    This is an automated response. Please do not reply.
    We have received your Project1 submission on Sun Jan  9 20:34:24 CST 2006.
    We now have the following files from you for Project1
    ---------------------------------------------------
    COUPON makefile source1.c source1.h source2.c
    ---------------------------------------------------
        

4. Remove the temporary directory
   

         cd ..
         rm -R tmp
       

If you have any difficulty with electronic submission, please contact a TA or the instructor.