Latebreaking
News
The following textbook is mandatory in this course: Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principals, 4th edition, 2001, by William Stallings. It is published by Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-031999-6. The third edition of this textbook, on sale until summer 2000, is fine as well. One strong argument in favor of this (as opposed to some other) textbook is the fact that it exemplifies the abstract concepts we will discuss with examples taken from the probably most widely used operating systems: Windows 2000, Unix SVR4, Solaris, and Linux. This will help to put the general design principles and their relative tradeoffs into perspective.
TAs and Office Hours: there are no more office hours, the term is over
Students who do not write the final exam have the option to write an exam at a later point in time. This rule, aimed at students who are sick during exam periods, appearently leads to some abuse by students who strategically choose which exam to write when. In an effort to be fair to students who cannot write the exam for a legitimate reason, while at the same time discouraging the abuse of this rule, the following policy has been used by some faculty members:
This is the policy that I will also adopt for this course (since this is a third-year course, there will not be a supplemental exam, however). Please note that the above formulation leaves it up to the instructor whether the deferred examination will be harder or the marking scheme will be more rigorous.Students taking supplemental or deferred examinations have several more months to study than their colleagues. Also they have a less-crowded examination schedule. Thus it is only fair to the majority of students to expect a substantially better performance on these examination than on the final.
A page, maintained by the author/publisher, with additional information and resources, is available at http://WilliamStallings.com/OS4e.html. Additional interesting WWW resources are newsgroups. The newsgroup to discuss current OS research topics is comp.os.research. Any relevant announcements/news will be posted at the top of this page under the "Latebreaking News" section.
A note on assignments and cheating: all assignments are individual assignments. Evidence of cheating will be investigated and will be reported to the Associate Dean, see also General Regulations 14. Cheating consists of collaboration (handing in someone else's solution as your own as well as allowing someone else to copy your solution) and extensive quoting from textbooks and other sources without proper reference. I do encourage students to discuss the assignment questions with each other, and to consult textbooks and other sources to derive an answer. However, I also do expect students to hand in solutions that are their own individual effort, clearly identifying any external sources used (and your classmates do not count as valid external sources).
The slides are those that I plan to present in class. They intend to provide a synthesis of the course content. To actually understand the course concepts, and to prepare yourself adequately for exams and assignments, you must supplement this information, preferably by attending class, studying the course textbook, etc.