ECE344: Operating Systems

Announcements:

Please go to the lab group signup at the bottom of the page and enter your group information. One submission per group please. You will need to do this by September 13. Failure to do so will result in us assigning groups for you and there will be delays in setting up your SVN directory.

Course Staff Information:

Instructor: David Lie
Email: lie@eecg.toronto.edu
Office: SF2001C

Grade Allocation and Exam Type:

Final: 50%
Midterm: 25%
Labs: 25%

Calculator Type: 4 (None)
Exam Type: C Single Cheat Sheet

The midterm will take place Week of Oct 31st. Exact Date and Time TBD

Course Resources:

Blackboard Course Webpage: https://portal.utoronto.ca

There is not required textbook for the course, only course notes in the form of slides. Questions should be addressed to the bulletin board on the course web page, which will be monitored daily. While we will try to check the board as often as possible, this does not necessarily mean you will get an answer for your questions in less than 24 hours.

Lectures:

Lectures will be posted on the portal website a week before. You are encouraged to print them and bring them to lecture.

Labs:

All labs will be done on the ECF machines. You may do the labs on your own machines at home, but it is your responsibility to make sure that they work on the ECF machines where . As a result, it is important that you follow the submission instructions for each lab carefully. Labs will be done in groups of 2.

Each lab will be graded in the lab. A TA will ask you questions about your code and ask you to demonstrate to them that the code works. In addition for some labs, you will be asked to make a small change to your lab at the beginning of the lab period. The change should be trivial to make if you have organized your code well and understand how it works. Thus, think ahead when writing your code!

The course consists of 4 labs and one optional lab as follows. The labs are challenging, so be sure to pace yourself and not leave anything to the last minute. By the end of this, you will have implemented a good part of a simple operating system -- something you can brag about on your resume and to your non-computer literate friends! Some labs span several weeks and will have milestones every 1 or 2 weeks:

Lab 0: An Introduction to OS161 - Due Week of Sept 19
Lab 1: Synchronization - Due Week of Sept 26
Lab 2: System Calls - Due Oct 3 & Oct 10
Lab 3: Virtual Memory - Due Oct 24, Nov 14 & Nov 28
Lab 4: File system - Bonus!

You may also find a good deal of lab documentation to help you out here.

Very Optional: If you want to see your OS actually run on real hardware instead of sys161 (the OS161 emulator), it happens that the architecture os161 runs on (mips) is essentially the same as the one used by the Altera nios processor you've used in other courses.

Course Policies:

Missed Labs: Missed labs will be made up on a case-by-case basis. Please have appropriate documentation (i.e. doctor's note, etc...)

Cheating: Each group should work independently. You may confer with each other, but your work should be your own. You should understand your code well enough to describe it to the TA and make simple changes to it when asked to.

Course Schedule:

Week	Lecture	Lab
Sept 5	Intro
Sept 12	Fundamentals and Overview
Sept 19	Threads & Processes	Lab 0
Sept 26	Threads & Processes/Synchronization	Lab 1
Oct 3	Synchronization	Lab 2.0
Oct 10	Memory Management	Lab 2.1
Oct 17	Instructor away, no lecture	Lab 3.0
Oct 24	Memory Management	Lab 3.0
Oct 31	Memory Management/Scheduling	Midterm, no lab
Nov 7	Scheduling	Lab 3.1
Nov 14	File Systems & Disk Management	Lab 3.1
Nov 21	File Systems & Disk Management	Lab 3.2
Nov 28	Virtualization and Hypervisors	Lab 3.2
Dec 5	Cloud Computing, Mobile OS

Lab Group Signup: