CS170: Operating Systems (undergrad)

Latest Announcements

02/14: Lab 4: Lab 4 is released. It is due on 2/21 (Thursday) at 9PM.
01/29: Homework 4: Homework4 released. It is due this Friday (02/01) at 9 PM.

Class information

Lecture time: TR 11:00 AM–12:15 PM
Lecture location: PHELP 2510
Instructor: Trinabh Gupta, 1121 HFH.
TA: Shailja
Review session: each of you must attend the review session each Wednesday from 6:00 PM to 6:50 PM at PHELP 2510

Communication

Please use Piazza for questions about assignments. If you include code that you have written, please mark your question private (failing to do this conflicts with the collaboration policy). Please expect response latency of 12 to 24 hours.
For administrative and sensitive questions, please email the course staff at trinabh@cs.ucsb.edu and yunzhao@cs.ucsb.edu.
Please note that questions about labs or course administration that are emailed to the instructor or a TA individually may be dropped.

Description and goals

We hope you learn three sets of interrelated things. The first thing is how computers work. Students graduating with CS degrees should believe "there is no magic": they should be able to describe the chain of events that occurs when they hit a key and cause a letter to appear on the screen from the register level (or logical gate level or transistor level) to the system architecture level to the operating system level to the application level. This is philosophically important, but it is also of practical interest to developers who need to figure out how to make a system do what they want it to do.

The second goal is for you to learn the core ideas in operating systems: concurrent programming, memory protection, virtual addressing, file systems, scheduling, etc. Often, such ideas are best explained as abstractions that some software layer (usually the operating system) provides above imperfect hardware to make that hardware usable by programmers and users. The intent is for you to understand such abstractions well enough to be able to synthesize new abstractions when faced with new problems.

Many of the ideas and abstractions that we will cover are relevant not only to operating systems but also to large-scale systems. Thus, a third goal of this course is to enhance your ability to understand, design, and implement large-scale systems.

The coding workload in this class will be substantial. This is a necessity: understanding many of the ideas above requires implementing them or working through them in code. The good news is that if things go according to plan, you will learn a lot in this class, and ideally find it rewarding. For example, you will learn how operating systems are implemented, and how to effectively use the abstractions exported by operating systems.

Course content

The lectures will cover topics in operating systems and the topic of systems generally. The schedule is here.
The review sessions will go over homework problems, work new exercises, and cover the labs.
The labs are a crucial component of this course and are described here. You will implement or interact with a number of the abstractions listed above.
The exams are described here.
The readings are listed on the schedule and should be completed before class. The required and optional texts are listed below.
The homeworks are intended to reinforce the course material. (These homeworks shouldn't be confused with the labs and their included exercises.)

Prerequisites

You must have taken CS 130A (Data structures and algorithms) in a previous quarter.
You must be either currently taking CS154 or ECE154A (Computer architecture) or must have taken one of these courses in a previous quarter.
This course—its lectures, readings, homeworks, lab assignments, basically everything—assumes that you are comfortable with Linux and programming in C. We strong advise that you take this course at a later time if you are not currently comfortable with C and Linux.

Textbook

We will follow Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (OSTEP), edition 0.90, by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau. This book is freely available online, at the link given. Besides this required text, we suggest several other books for reference:

Operating Systems and Middleware: Supporting Controlled Interaction, revised edition 1.3, by Max Hailperin. June 2017. This text is freely available online under this Creative Commons license.
Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, third edition, by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron. Pearson, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0134092669.
The C programming language, second edition, by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. Prentice Hall, Inc., 1988. ISBN-13: 978-0131103627. This book is a classic reference to C.
Operating Systems: Principles and Practice, second edition, by Thomas Anderson and Michael Dahlin. Recursive Books, 2014. ISBN-13: 978-0985673529.
Modern Operating Systems, fourth edition, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Herbert Bos. Pearson Education, Inc., 2015. ISBN-13: 978-0133591620.
Operating System Concepts, ninth edition, Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, and Greg Gagne. John Wiley & Sons, 2013. ISBN-13: 978-1118063330.

Acknowledgments

Much of the course material (including course description, labs, homeworks, and lecture content) is taken as-is from Michael Walfish's OS course at NYU. We are also indebted to the staffs of the ancestors of Mike's course at MIT, UCLA, Harvard, Stanford, and UT Austin (cs372h, cs372, and cs439 a, b, c). This site relies on software to generate course Web pages, developed by Dave Andersen and Nick Feamster.

Last updated: 2019-02-14 10:01:39 -0800 [validate xhtml]