Instructor: Thu D. Nguyen
Email: tdnguyen@cs.rutgers.edu
Office Hours: TBD
Office: CoRE 326

TA: Kien Le
Email: lekien@cs.rutgers.edu
Office Hours: By appointment
Office: Hill 367

• We will be using the Sakai system for many purposes, including annoucements, bulletin board for discussions, and distribution of reading material and programming assignments.

• Please make sure all emails sent to me and/or Kien for this class has the following in the subject: [cs519].  You can of course have other words in the subject as well but just make sure the [cs519] is in there somewhere so that we can find/filter all class-related emails.

Pre-requisites:

• Undergraduate courses in operating systems and architecture
  • In the past, 519 has included a great deal of material taught in 416. This term, while I will review some of the 416 material, this review will be much less extensive. So, you must have learned the basics taught in 416.
• C/C++

Books:

• There is no required text for this course. However, if you need to re-familiarize yourself with undergraduate material, some of which I will be reviewing, one of the following would be fine.
  • Operating System Concepts, Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne.  (latest edition: 7th?)
  • Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, Stallings.  (latest edition: 5th?)
  • Operating Systems Design and Implementation, Tanenbaum.  (latest edition: 3rd?)
  • If you used a different book for your undergrad OS course, that is probably fine too.

• You will be required to read 1-2 papers each week.  See the Lecture and Reading Schedule on the course home page.  The papers have been (or will be) uploaded to the Sakai's Resources and linked to the wiki.
• You should read the papers BEFORE lecture.  To encourage you to do this, you will be required to submit a short summary of each paper to the appropriate Sakai discussion forum by 3pm on the day when we will be discussing the paper during lecture.
• To pass the course, you MUST submit 75% of the summaries by the above deadline.

Taking notes:

• I would like two students to take notes for each lecture.  The two students should collaborate to generate just one set of notes.  You will be graded for this effort (see below) so do a good job!  (Not to mention that everyone doing a good job will be a mutual benefit since everyone will have a good set of notes to study for tests and for future references.)
• Notes for each lecture should be uploaded to Sakai (folder Student Lecture Notes in Resources) in pdf format and then linked into the wiki no later than 1 week after the lecture. (Please be careful when editing the wiki. In particular, do try not to delete important information that others have added to the wiki (including the links to the papers that I put there).
• I will provide my lecture notes and old slides through the wiki. You are welcome to start with these notes. You can also use the slides but they are old. I expect them to most be useful for you to borrow pictures I have made in the past so that you don't have to redraw them. However, these resources are just skeletons. You need to fill them out with things that we talk about in class. (You might even add in things that you think are particularly relevant but were skipped in class. To keep the notes from getting too long, you should only add things that are really important and really interesting.)
• You can also look at notes other students took for previous times I ran 519. In particular, follow links from my home page to previous 519 ran in 2003. I expect your notes to be better than the ones taken in 2003! I was not happy with the quality of the notes in 2003, which is why they are now 10% of your grade.

Grading

20% midterm
20% final
35% programming assignments
15% participation
10% class notes
Must submit 75% of reading summaries by deadline.

Programming assignments

• There will be 3-4 programming assignments.
• Programming assignments are due on-line via the Sakai assignment submission. We will not accept any other form (in particular, NO EMAIL). Also, we will not accept late assignments.

WE WILL NOT ACCEPT LATE ASSIGNMENTS! No buts, and, or ifs ...

Rules for collaborations

You are free to talk to your fellow classmates about your assignments. However, you must follow the Gilligan's Island rule. That is, after a joint discussion of an assignment, each student should discard all notes, go do something mind-numbing for an hour (like watching two episodes of Gilligan's Island), and then recreate the solutions. The idea of this policy is to ensure that you fully understand the solutions or ideas that the group came up with.

Later assignments may involve people working in teams. When this is the case, each person must understand all aspects of the assignment.

Last but not least, it is likely that you can find solutions to your assignments on the web. Copying from the web is CHEATING and will be dealt with severely. Needless to say, copying from your classmates is also cheating.