Old Announcements
- Mar 15: The lecture notes for week 9 have been posted below. On
Wed Mar 20, Test 2 will take place in class. The test will be based
on the lecture notes, and on the exercises suggested in class. The
test will consist of four questions on the following topics:
- Processes
- Threads
- CPU Scheduling
- UNIX filesystem
- Mar 8: The latest lecture notes have been posted below.
- Mar 7: In addition to the Threads exercises suggested in class on
Monday, you should also do the following exercises from Chapter 4,
Processes: 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6. As I mentioned on Monday,
Test 2 is going to be based on the lecture notes and suggested
exercises.
- Mar 5: Some reminders:
- Please hand in your writeup, outlining who is responsible for
saying what, in your team, at least a week before your presentation.
- If you require the AV box, also let me know a week before your
presentation, so that I can get in touch with the AV administration.
- Mar 1: Remember to hand in a write up of your presentation a week
before the presentation day.
- Mar 1: The latest lecture notes (week 7) have been posted below.
- Feb 27: There is a lecture this Friday, at 10:30, in the usual
room.
- Feb 27: If you still do not have a group, please send me an
email. I will put your name on a (short) list of people who have not
found a group yet. You can then get in touch with each other, and
decide on a group composition.
- Feb 15: Next week is Reading Week, so there will be no classes.
When we return, we will continue along the lines of the last lecture
(Monday Feb 11), i.e., we will take a more "main-stream" approach to
Operating Systems (processes, threads, virtual memory, networking,
etc.), with examples from Linux. I would also like to re-instate the
third lecture hour, and schedule it on Fridays at 2:30pm, or later
(and Thursday is also a possibility). Please let me know if Friday
2:30pm is absolutely impossible for you (and you intend to come to
class!). I will keep on posting lecture notes as usual.
- Feb 13: I just posted Test 1 with Solutions below.
- Feb 11: There was a question in class today, about "who actually
maintains the Linux Kernel." Click here
for a (more-or-less) current list of Linux Kernel maintainers. These
are the people that you would send your work to. If you do not get an
answer, the final contact point for Linux 2.4 submissions is Linus,
at torvalds@transmeta.com. You may also read (for fun) the Linux
Kernel Coding Style; click here, it is
pretty funny.
- Feb 11: Latest lecture notes have been posted below.
- Feb 10: Test 1 will take place this Wednesday (Feb 13), in class.
The test is 50min long. There will be 3 questions on the test,
related to paging algorithms. You should prepare for the test from
the lecture notes. You will have to show properties of the paging
algorithms that we covered, but there will be no long proofs.
- Feb 7: The members of the first team have been posted below, in
the Problem Sets section.
- Feb 6: Latest lecture notes have been posted below.
- Feb 6: For Assignment 2, I would like you to team up in groups of
five/six, and prepare a presentation on a topic in Operating Systems
of your choice (I suggest one of the topics in the book, such as
threads, or distributed computing). Your presentation should be 25min
long (we will try to fit two presentations in a lecture), and everyone
in the team should talk. This will be an excellent preparation for
your future careers, since presentations are a common thing. Please
notify me by email of the following, by the end of February:
- The members of your team.
- Your topic (click here for possible
topics).
- Your preferred date (click here for
available dates; I will erase the dates, as people reserve them).
A week before your presentation, submit a writeup (of at most 5
pages), outlining your presentation, and specifying who in your team
is responsible for presenting what section.
- Feb 6: The Solutions to Assignment 1 have been posted below. I
have instructed the TA not to mark Question 4, since it seems to me
that the problem was not well stated (we changed several times whether
k is or is not the cache size).
- Jan 30: The latest lecture notes have been posted below.
- Jan 23: The latest lecture notes have been posted below.
- Jan 21: TA office hours: Fridays, 11:40 to 12:40, in ITC222.
- Jan 17: My office hours are Mondays after class, in ITC214, for
an hour. Otherwise, you can meet me by appointment.
- Jan 17: The TA is Xiaofan (Stephen) Wang
wangx24@mcmaster.ca . We
have not yet finalized the schedule for the office hours, I'll post it
as soon as we do.
- Jan 16: The library just informed me that they do not have the
6th edition of the book, but they will order it, and it should be
available within a couple of weeks.
- Jan 16: The Sys Adm says that there are a few PostScript viewers
installed on the computer labs (e.g., GNU's gv, and ghostview, among
others). You can also convert PostScript to PDF using the command
ps2pdf, and view the result with Acrobat Reader.
- Jan 16: I have put our textbook on reserve in the library.
- Jan 14: Important Dates:
- Assignment 1: February 6
- Test 1: February 13
- Assignment 2: March 13
- Test 2: March 20
- Jan 14: The first Problem Set has been posted below.
Back to main page