SYSC 4001: Operating Systems (Winter 2005)

Latebreaking News
In the Winter 2005 term, Thomas Kunz was teaching the fourth-year undergraduate course on Operating Systems. The online calendar description can be found here. This page contains some information about the course and links to additional resources available to the class, either provided by the instructor or existing in the Internet. To find out more about the format of documents made available on this course webpage, read the comments on this page.

What is an OS? That is a difficult (and contentious) question.

The following textbook is mandatory in this course: Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principals, 5th edition, 2005, by William Stallings. It is published by Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-147954-7. 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 adopted widely in the Faculty of Engineering and Design:
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.
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.

A page, maintained by the author/publisher, with additional information and resources, is available at http://WilliamStallings.com/OS/OS5e.html. For work in the labs (though we don't have any programming assignments in the course), please consult the Health and Safety Manual.

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).

Password-protected course material: assignments and exams, lecture transparencies, etc.  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.