ICS 612 organization

This class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays 9-10:15 in Kuykendall 302.

Goals

• Deepen their fundamental understanding of operating systems by acquiring in-depth knowledge of the Minix operating system
• Broaden their fundamental understanding of operating systems by studying distributed systems, parallel computer operating systems, and embedded operating systems.
• practice creating, modifying and adapting operating system
• learn about operating system theory, including scheduling, allocation, and paging algorithms

Organization

All students are required to join the course mailing list.

Grades are assigned based on your performance on:

• projects, worth a total of 50% of the grade
• one presentation, worth 5% of the grade
• 2 midterm exams and a final, each worth 15% of the grade (total 45%)

Grading will use the (nearly) standard cutoffs of 97% (A+), 93% (A), 90% (A-), 87% (B+), 83% (B), 80% (B-), 77% (C+), 70% (C), 67% (D+), 63% (D), 60% (D-) (no C- will be assigned, due to UH not considering a C- a passing grade for many purposes). Depending on the performance of the class as a whole, I may or may not grade more generously (i.e. grade on a curve). In grading, I will be looking for evidence of understanding of the material and evidence of your ability to do work in the field.

Projects and homeworks must be turned in on time, and will only be accepted late for very good reasons. You must do well in the projects to do well in this class. Exams may be taken early, if requested at least one week before the scheduled time.

Authorship and Collaboration

In this course, students who wish to do so are encouraged to collaborate on projects, unless otherwise specified in the assignment. Groups may have up to three people and should be reported to the instructor at the beginning of each assignment. Whatever you turn in must have been written by you and, for coding, must be your code -- if developed by a group, all authors must be explicitly listed at the beginning of the code or the assignment. You may only collaborate with other students who are taking ICS 612 this semester -- collaborating with anybody else will definitely be considered cheating. Some of the homework and project solutions may benefit from information found on the web -- you are welcome to consult and use such material, but if you do so:

• you MUST list the URL(s) from which your information is derived, and
• any answer must be entirely your own and reflect your own knowledge and understanding

System

Projects will require a computer on which to install Minix. This may be a system you already own, perhaps that you are willing to dual-boot, or an emulation system, e.g. using bochs or qemu (see also a more comprehensive list of such emulators), or a system borrowed for the purpose (by way of the instructor) from the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation or other sources. There is a limited number of these loaner systems.

Textbook

The textbook is "Operating Systems -- Design and Implementation", by Andrew Tanenbaum and Albert Woodhull (3rd edition, 2006). The textbook is available from the UH bookstore and online sellers. The textbook has a home page.

It may be possible to use the 2nd edition of this textbook if you have convenient access to a friend who has the 3rd edition, but be aware that the version of Minix used in this course is somewhat different from the version documented in the 2nd edition, and also that you will be responsible for the material in the 3rd edition of the textbook.

Another alternative may be to purchase access to the online ("safari") version of the textbook. This instructor has no experience with this, and if you have (or have not) decided to go this route and have comments that may be useful to other students, please let me know or write to the mailing list.

Improvements

I do re-use these course material, so I am always grateful when students can suggest improvements or corrections to any notes. I normally acknowledge authors of major new material, and do not acknowledge people who suggest minor improvements.

No Cheating Policy: any cheating will result in a grade of 0 for the assignment or exam the first time it is detected, and a grade of F for the course for any subsequent instance. There is to be no collaboration whatsoever on exams, and only collaboration within a defined group on projects and homeworks. Anything you turn in must be entirely your own intellectual contribution. This applies to the entire group in the case of group projects and homeworks. The outreach college's instructor's manual states, in part:

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to, submitting, to satisfy an academic requirement, any document that has been copied in whole or in part from another individual's work without identifying that individual.

The submission or presentation of any work, in any form, that is not a student's own, without acknowledgment of the source.