CS560 -- Operating Systems

Jim Plank --- Spring, 2010

General Information

Professor: Jim Plank

TAS:

Class TT 11:10 to 12:25 in Ferris 512.

Labs are Wednesdays from 11:15AM - 2:15PM in in Claxton 105.

Grading is roughly 50% labs, 25% exam 1, 25% exam 2, although that may change.

Lab grading policy will be set mostly the TA. However, my lateness policy is 10 points off per day.

Lab questions should be directed to the TA first, and then me.

Lecture Notes

There will lecture notes for each lecture. These will be put on the web with a pointer hanging off the class home page. The point of lecture notes is to tell you what went on in class. If I covered material from the book, the notes will specify the sections. If the material is not in the book, the notes will contain instructional reference material.

All programs that I go over in class should be online in a directory for that class (~jplank/cs560/notes/XXX). The point here is that you don't have to try to copy them down in class. That is a waste of your time, which is best occupied otherwise.

I will try to make lecture notes available as soon as possible after class. Usually that will be by the end of the afternoon. I will notify you that the notes are completed by email.

Labs

The labs are where you are going to learn the most in this class. They are going to require far more than 3 hours per week. Thus, you will have to use evenings or weekends to get machine time. Work this out. Some classes will let you use extra machines if they are available and you are quiet. I believe there are no labs scheduled during evening and weekend hours. You may also want to explore remote login from UTCC machines, or from your own terminal and modem if you own one. Ask the TA's about how to log in remotely.

Handing in Labs

Labs will usually be due at noon on a monday. This is so that you may work on it over the weekend, and you can stay up all night sunday night if need be. I'm not saying that you have to do this, but enough students have requested it that this is what I'm doing.

Once you have finished writing your code, you must document it, create a makefile for it, and a shell script to show that it works. To submit homeworks, see the TA web page.

Plagiarism

You may talk with the TA's, other students, or me about your homeworks, but do the programming on your own. Copying other students' code is considered plagiarism. A corollary of this is that if your code virtually matches another student's code, that is plagiarism.

You should protect the directories that your homework is in so that no one but you can read it. I have seen too many instances of copying recently, and it can be prevented if you protect your directory. If we discover copying this time, both the copier and the copyee (?) will be penalized severely. You have been warned.

A bottom line: If you plagiarize, I will fail you. I've done it in the past. I will do it again, because it sickens me. If you can't do the work, please drop the class.

Dlists, rbtrees, etc.

I assume that you have taken CS360, and that you already know about the libraries for fields, dlists, and red-black trees. These are implementations of data structures that can make your lives much simpler. If you are not well-versed in these things (the fields library is less important, but easy to learn), then you should read the associated lecture notes from CS360, and practice by doing the relevant labs from CS360. The TA's will be happy to help you with these and give you feedback if you desire. The main link: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~jplank/plank/classes/cs360/360/notes/Libfdr/.