CS170: Operating Systems

This course focuses on the study of operating system design and implementation, and serves as an introduction into the study of computing systems. The main topics include: processes; interprocess communication and synchronization; memory management; file systems; input-output; security. The class itself has two main components, a design side that will be emphasized in lectures and an implementation side that will be explored through several programming projects. The programming component will give you a real taste of systems programming and the inner workings of a real-world OS (Minix). I will cover the course material in class in a presentation form. This material is based on the book "Operating Systems - Design and Implementation (3rd edition)" by A. Tanenbaum and A. Woodhull. This book provides a nice mix of OS concepts and an in-depth treatment of Minix 3.

Lectures:	Mon/Wed/Fri, 1:00PM--1:50PM	Phelps 3505
Instructor:	Christopher Kruegel	chris (at) cs.ucsb.edu
TA:	Vlasia Anagnostopoulou	vlasia (at) cs.ucsb.edu

Class participation is a critical part of your evaluation in the course. This means attending class and actively learning the material. To encourage (on-time) attendance to each class, I will be scheduling a sequence of several short quizzes throughout the quarter. These quizzes are scheduled more or less randomly, and generally include a single straight-forward question on material from the previous lecture. Missing a lecture day when a quiz is announced means a zero score on the quiz.

The grading for 170 will come from two exams (midterm and final), programming projects on Minix, and some in-class quizzes. For the Minix projects, you will learn to extend the functionalities of a real Unix-style operating system that can run natively on your hardware or on a virtual machine (such as Qemu or VMware).

Projects	50%
Exmas (Midterm and Final)	45%
Quizzes	05%

Project assignments are due at 11:59:59PM on the night it is due. For details on how to submit your assignment, you should read the project submission page (which is coming soon).

A note on cheating. We encourage you to talk with your classmates and discuss your approaches on projects, but any actual copying of code is cheating. Cheating will result in a 0 on the assignment, and depending on severity, can result in a failing grade or possible administrative action by UCSB.