263-3800-00 Advanced Operating Systems

Overview

This course is intended to give students a thorough understanding of design and implementation issues for modern operating systems. We will cover key design issues in implementing an operating system, such as memory management, scheduling, protection, inter-process communication, device drivers, and file systems. We will pay particular attention to system structures that differ from traditional monolithic arrangements of Unix/Linux and Windows. This course builds on the undergraduate operating systems course offered at ETH ( 252-0056-00), the contents of which will be assumed knowledge.

The course consists of lectures, project work, and a written examination. Project work will be performed in small groups, where students will implement major components of a microkernel-based operating system. The examination will consist of a combination of short- and long-answer questions in English; all material covered in lectures and in the project is considered examinable. The final assessment will be a combination of project and examination grades with a weighting of 65% project to 35% examination.

Notices

(in reverse chronological order)

• Due to an earlier inconsistency in the webpages, the electronic submission deadline for milestone 8 (the full source code for your system) will be deferred, as described here.
  —andrewb, 20.05.2008
• I have made a minor correction to the specification for milestone 8. The linker argument to specify the start address of the text section is -Ttext, not -T.
  —andrewb, 19.05.2008
• The exam has been set for Wednesday 11.06.08; see below for details.
  —andrewb, 06.05.2008
• I have corrected some misleading uses of the words "page" and "frame" in the Milestone 1 example code that had confused students.
  —andrewb, 12.03.2008
• Instructions for accessing a revision control system for group work (everything from milestone 1 onward) are now available.
  —andrewb, 05.03.2008
• The project instructions have been finalised, and a few bugs fixed in the supplied environment. If you already started work, you should recreate your VM image and update your source tree.
  —andrewb, 29.02.2008
• The lecture schedule has been updated and the week 1 slides added. Please note that the project specification is still subject to change, as we finalise the local development environment.
  —andrewb, 19.02.2008
• The consultation and marking times are now posted.
  —andrewb, 05.02.2008
• The course website is now active. Stay tuned for more information.
  —andrewb, 04.02.2008

Schedule

Text and reference books

There is no textbook for this course, as no published book covers the material in sufficient depth. However, the following reference books may be of use:

• A. Tannenbaum, A. Woodhull: Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, 2^nd ed. 1997, Prentice Hall.
• Curt Schimmel: UNIX Systems for Modern Architectures, 1994, Addison Wesley.
• M. Beck, H. Böhme, M. Dziadzka, U. Kunitz, R. Magnus, and D. Verworner: Linux Kernel Internals, 1997, Addison Wesley.
• Marshall K. McKusik, Keith Bostic, Michael J. Karels, John S. Quarterman: The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, 1996, Addison Wesley.
• Helen Custer: Inside Windows NT, 1993, Microsoft Press.
  2^nd version authored by David A. Solomon, (1998), 3^rd version authored by David A. Solomon and Mark Russinovich titled ``Inside Windows-2000'' (2000).
• Helen Custer: Inside the Windows NT File System, 1994, Microsoft Press.
• Scott Maxwell: Linux Core Kernel Commentary, 1999, CoriolisOpen Press.
• John Lions: Commentary on UNIX 6^th edition with source code, 1996, Peer-to-Peer Communications.
• Henry M. Levy: Capability-Based Computer Systems, 1984, Digital Press.
• Selected research papers as referred to in class.

Staff

• Timothy Roscoe (troscoe at inf) IFW B45.2
• Andrew Baumann (andrewb at inf) IFW B45.1
• Simon Peter (speter at inf) IFW B47.1
• Guest lecturers

Course evaluation

Course evaluation results: Mothy, Andrew, Simon.