416 Announcements

Breaking news about the course

May 6
Reminder: the 416 final exam is tomorrow, May 7, from 4:00pm to 7:00pm in our regular classroom. Be sure to arrive on time. The exam will comprise 50 multiple choice questions. The final will be cumulative but there will be a greater emphasis on scheduling, memory management, and file systems. If you are planning on taking the final and did not tell me so, please do so now!
May 2
Information about the final exam was posted on the exam page for the past few days. I just added this semester's exams and solutions to the list of old exams. Ignore this if you are not taking the final.
May 1

Course grades are posted on sakai. You will see two grades in the Course category.

  • Pre-Final Course Grade

    The Pre-Final Course Grade is the grade that you will get in the course if you do not take the final. It's on a standard 4-point scale: 0=F, 1=D, 2=C, 2.5=C+, 3=B, 3.5=B+, 4=A. A few of you will see a 4.5, which means you earned an A+ in the course but it will be reported as an A since Rutgers does not have A+ grades.

  • Bump Grade

    The Bump Grade is the grade that you need to get on the final exam to increase your grade to the next half grade level. For example, if your course grade is a 3 (B) and your bump grade is a 64, it means that you need to get at least a 64 on the final exam to change your B to a B+. If your bump grade is a 0, that means that your grade will not change even if you take the final exam.

Action required: If you plan on taking the final, please let me know. If you definitely plan to NOT take the final and your grade is not an A, please let me know as well. If your grade is an A, you don't have to let me know.

April 30
All grades for exams, quizzes, and homeworks are on sakai. Assignment 4 was regraded to give a bit more credit for the trivial case of the driver loading but not really functioning. For some of you, this resulted in an improved grade. If you have any questions about your grade for assignment 4, please contact Bill immediately and Cc me. If you have any questions about your grade for assignment 6, please contact Nader immediately and Cc me. For all other questions, please contact me. Please bring up any questions by noon tomorrow (May 1) at the latest.
April 25
If you have not done so yet, please go to sakai and fill out the teaching survey for the course so I will stop getting email telling me that 53 students have not yet responded.
April 25
Tonight's recitation is canceled.
April 20
I just made some very small changes to the study guide. I fixed a few unclear sentences in the SMB discussion, added a sentence to mention the socket structure (the explanation was already there), explain NAPI, and explain the validation of a certificate. These should be the last set of changes. If you spot any typos or unclear sentences, please let me know.
April 20
Over the past few days, I've been fixing some of the lecture notes. It's mostly been correcting typos but I've also tried to rephrase or expand upon items that I thought were not all that clearly presented. Updates include:

Note that I do not have stand-alone lecture notes for security, authentication, and cryptographic systems. You'll have to use the slides, your own notes, and the study guide. I've made the study guide far more thorough in these areas to cover pretty much all you need to know.

The list of topics has been updated as well.

April 11
I realized that I neglected to release a bunch of grades on sakai. I've released them this week and you should be able to see your grades for assignments 1,2, and 3; quizzes 1 and 2; and exams 1 and 2. Please inform me of any omissions or discrepencies.
April 11
If you have any problems in running FUSE, mounting the file system, or any aspect of implementing the assignment, tonight is your last chance to get help in recitation.
April 7
Assignment 6 is posted and due online at 11:55pm, Wednesday, April 18, 2012. This is a programming assignment that involves creating a user-level file system for displaying stock market data and was discussed during this past recitation. Don't wait to start this.
March 27
Tomorrow's recitation is canceled.
March 27
Assignment 5 is posted and due Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at the start of recitation.
March 23
Now that I finished composing exam 2, I updated the list of topics a little bit to cross out a few more things that will not be on the exam. These are minor changes but might save you a few minutes if you are cramming for the exam.
March 23

I added a bit more of a discussion on UFS and fixed some typos in the file system implementation lecture notes. I also expanded the study guide to include a coverage of file systems, although I did not yet add a discussion of special file systems and devices (such as null, random, and procfs). You'll have to consult the lecture notes for that. Finally, I added solutions for the 2010 and 2011 exams that were covered in this week's recitation.

March 22

Minor updates to these lecture notes:

March 21

I updated the lecture notes for memory management. The memory management notes include a discussion of linking. A section has been added for kernel memory management, including the page allocator, Linux slab allocator, and a deeper discussion of the Buddy System.

The paging notes fix some typos. Discussions of the system memory map and logical/physical addressing modes have been moved to the memory management notes.

I also added a list of topics for next week's exam.

March 5
The deadline for Assignment 4 has been extended by one week to March 18.
February 28
I updated the online version of yesterday's paging lecture notes since I added a few slides five minutes before the start of class. I also pusted the solutions to exam 1.
February 24
Assignment 4, the second programming assignment that was covered in this past recitation, is posted and is due on March 11, 2012. Materials are posted on sakai as well as on my site. You have just a bit over two weeks for it and the assignment requires kernel programming, so do not delay starting it. Note also that you need to do this in a group of three, so find partners if you do not have them yet.
February 20

I just posted solutions for the Fall 2010 exam 1.

If you're cramming for tonight's exam, remember to go through the list of topics and the study guide.

Please do not send me requests to defer the exam or to allow you to take it at a later date. Your asking is not fair to other students who may be in a similar situation but would not even consider making such a request. You are welcome to skip this exam and get a grade of 0. You will then have to take the final, which will serve to replace the grade for this exam.

February 15
Information about the first exam is posted here. Note the link to the study guide, the individual links within the outline of topics, and the link for old exams.
February 10
I posted a testing checklist for assignment 2. There should be nothing surprising or new here but you should make a point of checking that your program behaves properly in all the tests listed. Also, please pay attention to the clean code section.
February 10

I fixed a bunch of typos in the lecture notes and slides from this past week's lecture on synchronization (mutual exclusion). I also expanded the lecture notes substantially with rephrased descriptions, more examples, mailbox figures, and a discussion of deadlocks. Please read this when you have time so you won't have to cram for the exam.

Note: I design the lecture notes primarily for HTML output but am trying an experiment of using MultiMarkdown so I can make authoring easier for myself (especially on the iPad) and produce Latex output to automatically generate a PDF version as an option to HTML. I hope that they are usable. There are some limitations. I don't have control of image scaling and positiong in Latex, so the figures are generally much bigger than I'd like them to be and don't support page wrapping. I also can't do some basic formatting, such as subscripts. Sidebar boxes, such as the Intel architecture explanation and the naming of semaphores, do not appear in the Latex version. I don't expect to use those boxes for anything critical.

February 8
Please check the assignment FAQ periodically even if you don't have a question. It might clue you into some items that you may have misunderstood.
February 5
I added an FAQ for the assignment.
February 2
The second assignment is posted and is due February 12, 2012 at 11:00pm. This is a short programming assignment. Work on it by yourself for the next few days to get a really good understanding of what you need to do. Then you may form a group of up to four students. Start early in case you encounter problems. I'm giving you a lot of hand-holding for this assignment to make it easy but if you're weak in C, you may still struggle.
January 26
The first homework assignment is due Wednesday, February 2, 2012 at the start of recitation.
January 23
Welcome!