Lectures and Assigned Readings

Wednesday 7/3

Final in class today. 2.30-5.00 pm. Closed book. Syllabus: everything covered so far in class.
No class this morning.

Tuesday 7/2

Protocols for Distributed Systems
Covered in class: overview of synchronous and asynchronous system models, FLP result, Napster, Gnutella, Pastry.

Monday 7/1

RPC and advanced file systems
Reading: Notes from class give enough detail for the exam! Again, Silberschatz isn't the best reference. Here are some references for the material, for the curious:

Log-structured file system: Silberschatz 12.8 briefly describes some of the products which use LFS-style techniques.
The design and implementation of a log-structured file system is the main paper describing LFS.
Remote Procedure Calls: Silberschatz 4.6.2 covers the ideas, but not idempotent operations.
Implementing remote procedure calls is the original paper.
Performance of Firefly RPC is interesting to read as an example of just how much detail you can go into in analysing the performance of a system.
Network File System: Silberschatz 12.9 gives an overview of NFS.
Andrew File System: Silberschatz 16.6 describes AFS.
Scale and performance in a distributed file system is a good overview of AFS.
Coda, the successor to AFS at Carnegie-Mellon, is described in a recent overview paper, The evolution of Coda.

Friday 6/28

Distributed systems, networks and the Internet protocols
Reading: n.b. Notes from class will be more than enough for the exam, we will not test this material in as much detail as earlier parts of the course.
Coverage in Silberschatz doesn't match what was presented in class well, but Silberschatz chapter 15 is on distributed systems and networks. A better book for those who are interested is Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, by Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg. There are many others.
For those who are really interested, some papers worth looking at are:

End-to-end arguments in system design, Saltzer, Reed and Clark. This is a classic paper on how networking functions should be divided among machines in a network.
The design philosophy of the DARPA Internet protocols, Clark. Why the Internet protocols work the way they do.
The development of the Domain Name System, Mockapetris and Dunlap. How the DNS works.

Thursday 6/27

Disks and disk scheduling
Reading: Silberschatz 14.1-14.5

Wednesday 6/26

File systems and protection
Reading: Silberschatz 12.7, 18.1-18.5

Tuesday 6/25

File system: implementation
Reading: Silberschatz 12.1-12.6

Monday 6/24

File system: directory organisation.
Reading: Silberschatz 11.3, 11.4, 11.5.1, 11.6

Friday 6/21

File system: file abstraction, access methods.
Reading: Silberschatz 11.1, 11.2

Thursday 6/20

Virtual Memory (wrap-up).
Reading: Silberschatz: 10.6,10.8

Wednesday 6/19

Virtual Memory.
Reading: Silberschatz: 10.3-10.5

Tuesday 6/18

Virtual Memory.
Reading: Silberschatz: 10.1-10.2

Monday 6/17

In class Midterm
Syllabus: Everything covered in class until the end of Silberschatz Chapter 8 (Deadlocks).

Friday 6/14

Memory Management and Virtual Memory.
Reading: Silberschatz: Rest of Chapter 9

Thursday 6/13

Memory Management.
Reading: Silberschatz 9.2-9.4

Wednesday 6/12

Deadlocks: Banker's algorithm clarifications.

Memory Management. Reading: Silberschatz 9.1

Tuesday 6/11

Deadlocks: Avoidance, Detection and Recovery
Reading: Silberschatz : rest of Chapter 8.

Monday 6/10

Deadlocks: introduction, characterisation, deadlock prevention schemes
Reading: Silberschatz 8.1-8.4

Friday 6/7

Scheduling: scheduling algorithms and their evaluation
Reading: Silberschatz 6.3-6.6 (6.7 optional)

Thursday 6/6

Scheduling: background, terminology, criteria for comparison
Reading: Silberschatz 6.1-6.3

Wednesday 6/5

Synchronisation: monitors and summary
Reading: Silberschatz 7.7

Tuesday 6/4

Synchronisation: the Dining Philosophers problem, critical regions
Reading: Silberschatz 7.5.3, 7.6

Monday 6/3

Synchronisation: semaphores, classical synchronisation problems
Reading: Silberschatz 7.4, 7.5

Friday 5/31

Synchronisation: introduction, hardware support
Reading: Silberschatz 7.1-7.3

Thursday 5/30

Threads
Reading: Silberschatz 5.1,5.2,5.3

Wednesday 5/29

Processes: operations and ipc (contd.)
You can skip any Java code and associated descriptions appearing in the text.

Tuesday 5/28

Processes: operations and ipc
Reading: Silberschatz 4.4-4.7 (except 4.5.5, 4.5.6, 4.6.3)

Monday 5/27

Memorial Day, no class.

Friday 5/24

Processes: introduction
Reading: Silberschatz 4.1-4.3, skim through 3.1-3.3, 3.5.

Thursday 5/23

Computer architecture background, architecture support for operating systems.
Reading: Chapter 2 of Silberschatz.

Wednesday 5/22

Introduction to the course, history of operating systems.
Reading: Chapter 1 of Silberschatz.