CS270 -- Lecture and Reading List

Rich Wolski --- Fall, 2025

Note that there will be a lecture for each reading and that you should have read the paper before the lecture. Your class participation grade will be determined by the degree to which you have read and understood the papers before the lecture in which they are presented.

Class Schedule and Reading List

Sep 29

Course introduction (no reading required)

Historical Perspective

Oct 1

E. W. Dijkstra, The Structure of the 'THE'-Multiprogramming System, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 5, May 1968, pp. 341-346.

Oct 6

P. B. Hansen, The Nucleus of a Multiprogramming System, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 4, April 1970, pp. 238-241, 250.

Oct 8

D. M. Ritchie and K. Thompson, The UNIX Time-Sharing System, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 7, July 1974, pp. 365-375.

Unix, Linux, and the File System and Class Project

Oct 13

Review of POSIX file system calls in Linux using these lecture notes from 170 (up through process forking).
Review the standard implementation of Linux files using these lecture notes on the file system

Oct 15

Continue the introductory File System Lecture

Oct 20

Finish the introductory File System Lecture
Review The Class Project

Oct 22, Oct 27, Oct 29, Nov 3

OS Virtualization: Fear and Loathing in the Intel Architectural Design.

Lecture notes on Linux internals
Lecture notes on OS virtualization

Useful references include

KVM Good overview of KVM internals
Xen: Xen Overview and Futures
LXC: Containers based on Linux Namespaces and cgroups

Alternative Operating Systems Designs

Nov 5

M. Accetta et al, Mach: A New Kernel Foundation For UNIX Development, 1986.

Nov 10

Brian N. Bershad, Stefan Savage, Przemyslaw Pardyak, Emin Gun Sirer, Marc Fiuczynski, David Becker, Susan Eggers, Craig Chambers, Extensibility, Safety and Performance in the SPIN Operating System, ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 1995, pages 267-283.

Nov 12

Dawson R. Engler and M. Frans Kaashoek and James O'Toole, Exokernel: An Operating System Architecture for Application-Level Resource Management, ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 1995, pages 251-266.

Nov 17

Madhavapeddy A, Mortier R, Rotsos C, Scott D, Singh B, Gazagnaire T, Smith S, Hand S, Crowcroft J. Unikernels: Library operating systems for the cloud. ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News. 2013 Mar 16;41(1):461-72.

Operating System Philosophy

Nov 19

R. Gabriel, The Rise of Worse is Better, 1991.

Nov 24

Jerome H. Saltzer and David P. Reed and David D. Clark, End-To-End Arguments in System Design, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Volume 2, Number 4, Nov. 1984, pages 277-288.

Nov 26

Class is canceled. Please enjoy the time off.