CSCI-GA.3250-001: Honors Operating Systems (Grad)

Latest Announcements

12/3: Final project demo scheduling: Please email the course staff to set up a time for a final project demo on Friday December 18 or Tuesday December 22.
12/3: Office hours on December 11 moved one hour later: Mike's office hours on Friday December 11 will be 4:00-5:00 instead of the usual 3:00-4:00.
12/3: Prior exam posted: The exams page includes an example exam. There are no guarantees about similarity of format, difficulty, scope, etc.
11/16: Office hours switch on Wednesday: On November 18, Mike will cover Zhen's office hours from 2:00-3:00. From 3:00-4:00, Zhen will be in his usual spot.
11/16: Just kidding about change of venue: We will meet in our usual classroom. Apologies for the confusion.
11/10: Change of venue on Tuesday, November 17: Our class will meet at Trammell Hudson's talk: 719 Broadway, Room 1221
11/5: Final project code due on December 21.: Demo schedule TBD.
11/3: Lab 7 released: Lab 7 is released. The lab consists of three deliverables. Project proposals are due by email to the staff email list on November 16 (no slack hours can be used). Code is tentatively due on December 11. Demos will tentatively take place on December 14 and 15.
11/2: Lab 6 released: The lab is in two parts. Part 6A is due Friday, November 13. Part 6B is due Friday, November 20.
10/26: Lab 5 released: The lab is due November 6, 9:00 PM.

Course information

Meetings: TueTh 3:30-4:45 PM, CIWW 312

Make-up times: There are days when I cannot avoid being out of town. We will compensate for the missed meetings with attendance-optional meetings on selected Friday afternoons, times TBD.

Instructor: Michael Walfish.
- Office hours: Fridays, 3:00-4:00 PM, or by appointment. Office: 715 Broadway, Room 709.
Instructional assistant: Zhen Sun. zs533 at nyu dot edu. Office hours: Wednesdays, 2:00-4:00 PM, 719 Broadway, Room 709.
Communication:
- Please use Piazza for questions about assignments. If you include code that you have written, please mark your question private.
- For administrative and sensitive questions, please use the staff email alias: cs3250-staff-fa15@csres.co
- Please do not email the staff individually with questions about assignments; emails so addressed may be dropped.
- There is a course mailing list (staff and students): csci_ga_3250_001_fa15@cs. Sign up here.

Description

This course is for students who want to hack on operating systems and more generally learn how they work. Class meetings will cover research papers (both classic and recent) and readings on operating systems, with a significant portion of class time devoted to discussion. A crucial component of the course is the labs. Students will implement the core of an exokernel-style operating system, called JOS. (JOS was developed for MIT's 6.828 and has been used in courses at several other schools, including NYU.)

Prerequisites and suggested background

We will assume basic systems knowledge, such as an undergraduate course in operating systems, networking, or distributed systems. An alternative is significant systems-building experience on a large project.
The labs assume comfort and fluency in C programming.
The labs require some assembly programming and provide tutorials.
If you are planning to take this class, and you do not have all of fluency in C, some exposure to assembly, and systems-building experience, that is okay: you will learn these things! However, you should leave extra time to complete the labs, particularly at the beginning of the course. As a common example, if you are not comfortable with C-style pointers, then this item applies to you.
If you have never had an undergraduate course in systems, or you are not truly comfortable programming computers, then the course is probably not for you.

Who should take this course?

PhD students who are interested in systems. This course satisfies the master's core OS requirement. If you are a masters student who has had previous exposure to systems (see above), then this course might be a good way to satisfy the core OS requirement, provided that you are prepared to challenge yourself.

The work

The class will consist of assigned readings, twice-weekly discussions, labs, a final exam, and a final project:

The assigned readings are research papers, and they should be completed before class.
The discussions are based on the assigned readings. The policies page details the relationship between readings, discussion, and grading. The short version is: participation is an important component of your grade, but if you haven't read the paper, you should not show up for the discussion. (Seriously.) Also, the discussion will involve cold-calling. Cold-calling here means that the instructor will ask a question so everyone can think about the answer, then select a student's name using a shuffled deck of cards, and then call on that student.
The labs are a crucial component of this course. You will implement (the interesting pieces of) a real operating system that will boot on a PC. The labs are described in more detail here.
The exam will cover the entire class. See details here.
The final project has some flexibility. The default option is for you to add a significant piece of functionality to JOS, optionally working in pairs. However, another option is to build something that is independent of JOS. The three requirements for this second option are as follows. The project must (1) have a significant implementation component, specified by deliverables (2) concern operating systems and (3) be challenging and potentially research-worthy. For all projects, you must write a proposal that is accepted by the course staff.

We will assume that you check the announcements (either on this site or by RSS) every 24 hours. Also, we will use Piazza and occasionally email you (for the most urgent communications). You are responsible for monitoring all three of these media.

A note about the labs

Regardless of whether you have the suggested background, we recommend that you start the labs long before they are due. The standard advice is "Start the labs early", but that is not quite right. The best advice, I think, is "Start the labs on time, but on time is probably much earlier than you think it is".

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the staffs of related past courses at MIT, UCLA, Harvard, Stanford, and UT Austin, and ancestors of these courses. This site relies on software to generate course Web pages, developed by Dave Andersen and Nick Feamster.