Latest Announcements
- 12/13: Final will be closed book, but you can bring TWO two-sided sheets of notes
- As with the midterm, you may bring notes. Note that whereas for the midterm you had ONE two-sided sheet, for the final, you may bring TWO two-sided sheets, for a total of four sides of printing. As with the midterm, we have formatting requirements for each sheet. Here they are: Times New Roman font, minimum 10 point font, minimum 1 inch margins on all sides, maximum 55 lines per side (which is a busy single-spaced sheet). Do not exceed 1 inch margins, even if it means that you cannot fit 55 lines per side. If you use handwriting, same deal: your handwriting should be no smaller than 10pt, your margins should be at least 1 inch, etc., etc.
- 11/22: HW11 released
- It's due 12/07/21.
- 11/16: Lab 5 released
- It's due December 3. As always, start on time, and on time means right after lab 4.
- 11/15: This Thursday's review session moving to Tuesday 11/23
- There will be a review session on Tuesday 11/23.
- 11/15: HW10 released
- It's due 11/23/21.
- 11/08: HW9 released
- It's due 11/16/21.
- 11/3: Date and place of the final exam now on the schedule page
- The final exam is Monday, December 20, 6PM in our normal meeting room.
- 11/1: Midterm solutions and distribution posted
- Solutions to the midterm are posted on the exams page. The distribution of scores on the exam is here.
- 11/01: HW8 released
- It's due 11/9/21.
- 10/20: Lab 4 released
- It's due November 19. As always, start on time, and on time means right after the midterm.
Course information
- Section: CSCI-UA.0202-001
- Lectures: MonWed 4:55 PM – 6:10 PM, GCASL C95
- Review sections (optional): description and logistics
- Communication:
- Please use Campuswire for questions about assignments. If you include code, please mark your question private (per the collaboration policy). Please expect response latency of 12 to 24 hours.
- For administrative and sensitive questions, please email cs202-21fa-staff@nyu.edu
- Please email individual course staff only for things like setting up meetings with that person; individual emails about labs or course administration may be dropped.
- Instructor: Michael Walfish
- Teaching Assistants: (see also points
of contact)
Name Email (add @nyu.edu) Elizabeth Labor (head TA) em.labor Arasu Arun arasu Xiangyu Gao xg673 Michael Ma mm10516 Yashaswi Malla ym1929 Panchi Mei pm2885 Khanh Nguyen kn1600 Daniel Tomkovicz dht253 - Office hours: calendar.
The work
- The lectures will cover topics in operating systems and the topic of systems generally. The schedule is here.
- The labs are a crucial component of this course and are described here. You will implement, help implement, or interact with, a number of the abstractions described below.
- The exams are described here.
- The readings are listed on the schedule and should be completed before class. The required and optional texts are listed below.
- The homeworks (as distinct from the labs) are intended to reinforce the course material.
We assume that you check the announcements on this site every 24 hours. Also, we will use Campuswire (join the class here). Finally, we will occasionally email you (for the most urgent communications). You are responsible for monitoring all three of these media.
A note about the labs
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, we think, is "Start the labs on time, but on time is probably much earlier than you think it is".
Description and goals
We hope you learn three sets of interrelated things. The first thing is how computers work. Students graduating with CS degrees should believe "there is no magic": they should be able to describe the chain of events that occurs when they hit a key and cause a letter to appear on the screen from the register level (or logical gate level or transistor level) to the system architecture level to the operating system level to the application level. This is philosophically important, but it is also of practical interest to developers who need to figure out how to make a system do what they want it to do.
The second goal is for you to learn the core ideas in operating systems: concurrent programming, memory protection, virtual addressing, file systems, scheduling, transactions, etc. Often, such ideas are best explained as abstractions that some software layer (usually the operating system) provides above imperfect hardware to make that hardware usable by programmers and users. The intent is for you to understand such abstractions well enough to be able to synthesize new abstractions when faced with new problems.
Many of the ideas and abstractions that we will cover are relevant not only to operating systems but also to large-scale systems. Thus, a third goal of this course is to enhance your ability to understand, design, and implement large-scale systems.
The coding workload in this class will be substantial. This is a necessity: understanding many of the ideas above requires implementing them or working through them in code. The good news is that if things go according to plan, you will learn a lot in this class, and ideally find it rewarding. For example, you will learn how operating systems are implemented, and how to effectively use the abstractions exported by operating systems.
Readings
Required texts
| OSTEP | Operating Systems: Three Easy
Pieces, by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C.
Arpaci-Dusseau. Arpaci-Dusseau Books, August 2018, edition 1.00.
Note: This book is freely available online, at the link given. |
| OSM:SCI | Operating
Systems and Middleware: Supporting Controlled Interaction, by Max
Hailperin. June 2019, Revised Edition 1.3.1.
Note: As with the preceding text, this text is online and free. It is available under this Creative Commons license. |
| CS:APP3e | Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, Third
Edition, Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron. (Pearson),
2010. ISBN: 013409266X.
Note: The prerequisite to this class (CS201) required this text, so we assume that you already have it. |
Optional texts
- Highly recommended: The C programming language (second edition), Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. (Prentice Hall, Inc., 1988. ISBN: 0-13-110362-8.) This book is a classic reference to C.
- Optional: Operating Systems: Principles and Practice, Beta Edition, Anderson and Dahlin. (Recursive Books, 2012. ISBN: 0985673516.)
- Optional: Modern Operating Systems (third edition), Andrew S. Tanenbaum. (Prentice Hall, Inc., 2008. ISBN: 0-13-600663-9.) Note: the NYU bookstores list this text as required; it is not (it was in an earlier version of this class.)
- Optional: Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction, Jerome Saltzer and M. Frans Kaashoek (Morgan Kaufmann, 2009. ISBN: 0-12-374957-3.)
- Optional: Operating System Concepts (eighth edition), Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, and Greg Gagne. (John Wiley & Sons, 2008. ISBN: 0-47-012872-0.)