COMP3301/7308
Operating Systems Architecture
Semester 2, 2009
This course assumes an elementary understanding of operating systems concepts and a strong background in C programming.
The course is based on understanding operating system concepts mainly using the Minix 3 operating system for examples, but with excursions into systems used in the real world.
Website updates
Is this course for you?
This course is intended to provide in-depth study and understanding of operating system implementation. It will prepare you for research in operating systems and distributed computing, implementation of novel operating systems or existing operating systems on novel devices, and development of device drivers.
The course is compulsory for the Computer Systems and Networks major in BInfTech.
You should not take this course if you have weak programming skills. A good test of whether this course is for you is if you did COMP2303 or similar, and did well in the C programming component.
All of the assignments will require extensive C programming skills, if you haven't programmed in C, or are not willing to put in significant extra effort to learn C in detail, I would discourage you from enrolling in the class.
You should consider taking this course if you want to develop an insight into how things work.
Lecturer: John Williams
Timetable
We will have a 3 hour block on TBD 9-12. This will consist of lectures and tutorial material, but the tutorial material will normally be in the last hour. The UQ timetabling system can't cope with a 2 hour lecture which starts at an odd hour (9am), hence the timetable system needs to put lecture 10-12, and tut 9-10.
There are 3 scheduled lab sessions - please sign-on for one of these, I'll open sign-on around July 14th.
Textbook, Webites, Software
A.S Tanenbaum & AS Woodhull: Operating Systems, Design and Implementation (3rd Edition).
We will follow this textbook quite closely and it will be very useful for the assignments
Also see the minix website: www.minix3.org
For assignments, you will be running MINIX on VMplayer. You can download this from the minix website above onto your own computer if you want to get some experience before the start of semester.
The course will run slightly differently this year - but if you wish to look at last year's course run by Neil Bergmann, etc see the 2008Archive link on the left menu.
Dr
John Williams
School of Info. Tech. and Elec.
The
Phone:
+61-7-3365-2185
Fax: +61-7-3365-4999
E-mail: jwilliams@itee.uq.edu.au
CRICOS Provider No: 00025B