CSC 369S | Course Home Page and Overview | Spring 2007

News

May 10

• A summary of your term marks, and your unofficial final grade has been emailed to your CDF accounts. Please contact me if you have not received your marks.

May 4

• Your A2 and A3 marks have been emailed to your CDF accounts. Please contact me if you have not received your marks.

April 26

• I had some post-exam questions about the synchronization problem, so for the curious, here's the solution.

April 17

• As mentioned in the final lecture, there will be a pre-exam study session on Wednesday (April 18) from 6-8 p.m. in BA 024. Bring any questions from past exams, the textbook, or the lecture notes that you would like me to go over.
• Office hours during study week will continue as usual (Tuesday 2-4, Thursday 5-6).

March 30

• A3 has now been posted.

March 23

• A1 marks have been emailed to your CDF accounts.

March 14

• I will be out of town next week (March 19-25), though I will still be answering email. Reza Azimi will deliver a guest lecture on Disk I/O and File System Optimizations. Tom Walsh will be holding office hours, 2-4 pm on Tuesday in BA 3234, and 5-6 pm on Thursday in BA 4290.

March 5

• A2 has been posted.

March 2

• A2 will be posted for Monday, March 5th. New due date will be Monday, March 26.

February 27

• Midterm locations have been posted. Make sure you are going to the right room!
• Sample solutions to A1 are available on CDF at /u/csc369h/winter/pub/asst1/asst1_soln.tgz. Note that this archive contains only the files that were changed for A1. The src/asst1/design.txt describes the solutions at a high-level and summarizes the files that were changed for the solution.

February 8

• Solutions to the warmup exercises (code reading, locks and condition variables) are available on CDF at /u/csc369h/winter/pub/asst1/warmup_solns

January 31

• New Tutorial Room assignments: Now that we are into the group assignments, we will divide into tutorials based on groups.
  BA 3008: Group numbers 1 through 17 (for those not still looking for a group)
  BA 3000: Group numbers 18 and up, and those still looking for a group.
  See current Group List if you don't remember your group number.

January 26

• Running OS/161 and tools at home: If you want to install the full toolchain on a home machine, and your home machine is running Debian Linux, you will likely run into difficulties when building cs161-gdb. The issue is a missing libtermcap.a, which Debian does not include in the distribution. To fix this problem, you must tell the build for cs161-gdb to use the shared library, libncurses.so instead. Here is a patch you can use to fix the relevant "configure" file. To use it, first verify that /lib/libncurses.so.5 exists on your machine, save the patch in your cs161-gdb-1.4/ directory and then run "patch -p1 < gdb-debian-ncurses.patch".

January 13

• Assignment 0 is now posted. Note that it includes a mini-milestone check which must be submitted by next Friday (Jan 19)
• If you obtained the OS161 code distribution before noon today, you may have encountered some problems compiling as some test files accidently got left behind in the tarball. The distribution in the course directory dated "Jan 13 11:49" has been corrected.

January 2007

• There will a tutorial in the first week of class, held in SS 2118 (same location as the first lecture).
• Beginning January 17, lectures will be held in BA 1190.

General Information

Course Information Sheet ( pdf )

Instructor: Angela Demke Brown (demke369@cs.toronto.edu)

Teaching Assistants:

• Kiran Gollu
• Adin Scannell
• Tom Walsh

Class Meetings:

Newsgroup:
ut.cdf.csc369h
Read it at news://newssrv.cdf.utoronto.ca/ut.cdf.csc369h,
Post to it at mailto:ut.cdf.csc369h@news.cdf.utoronto.ca).

Prereqs

• CSC258
• CSC209
• CSC207/CSC270
• CGPA 3.0/enrolment in a CSC subject POSt

Marking Scheme

• 4 assignments - 40% (10%, 10%, 10%, 10%)
• Midterm Test - 20%
• Final Exam - 40%

Textbook

Modern Operating Systems, Second Edition Andrew S. Tanenbaum Prentice Hall ISBN: 0-13-031358-0

Course Description

From the Undergraduate Calendar:

Principles of operating systems. The operating system as a control program and as a resource allocator. The concept of a process and concurrency problems: synchronization, mutual exclusion, deadlock. Additional topics include memory management, file systems, process scheduling, threads, and protection.

An expanded view:

This course examines the role of the operating system, the major subsystems that make up a modern operating system, and the design principles and implementations behind them. A major theme for this course is dealing with concurrency. The operating system provides many of the abstractions and mechanisms that allow users to build concurrent programs, but the operating system itself is a complex concurrent system! Students in this course will gain an understanding of the need for synchronization and locking, and how to apply these tools to develop efficient concurrent programs.

Many of the concepts covered in this course recur in other systems that need to provide concurrency and resource management - database systems are a prime example. CSC 369 provides the basic framework for further study in operating systems (CSC 469) and database systems (CSC 443).

All assignments will include both written and programming components.