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. 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 probably the most widely used operating systems: Windows 2000, Unix SVR4, Solaris, and Linux. This will help students to put the general design principles and their relative tradeoffs into perspective.
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. Please note that the above formulation leaves it up to the instructor whether the supplemental or 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.
A note on assignments and cheating: the 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 clearly their own effort, clearly identifying the extensive use of external sources (and your classmates do not count as valid external sources).
The slides are those that I plan to present in class. They are intended 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 textbook, etc.