Faculty banner

 
CITS2230 Operating Systems
Unit home page

CITS2230 Operating Systems - Unit information for 2008

The most fundamental of all system programs is the operating system. The operating system controls all of a computer's resources, and provides a base on which application programs can be written. A modern operating system manages one or more processors, a hierarchy of memory, clocks, terminals, disks, network interfaces, and other input/output devices. The operating system's purpose is to provide an orderly and controlled allocation of all of these resources amongst the programs competing for them.

CITS2230 introduces the key mechanisms of all operating systems - processes, memory management, file systems, and protection and security. The evolution of these mechanisms is presented through a historical tour of operating system development, leading to a study of current hardware and operating system speeds, capacities, and physical limitations. The role of processes, and their creation, scheduling, synchronization, and communication is covered. This is followed by a study of storage management: static and dynamic allocation, paging and segmentation, virtual memory and demand paging, page replacement algorithms, and memory caches and their effect on performance. File system concepts are addressed: input/output hardware and software, files, directories and access mechanisms, file allocation and access algorithms, and performance. Finally, the increasingly important areas of protection and security are introduced: goals, authentication, access mechanisms, protection domains, access control lists and capabilities, and monitoring.

Throughout the unit, reference is made to case-studies from two of today's most successful operating systems, Linux and Microsoft Windows. Laboratory and tutorial work compare and contrast the provision of the key operating system mechanisms in each environment.

Information available from here:

Unit coordination:

Unit Coordinator: Lyndon While
Lecture times: 3:00 - 4:45pm Mondays (GPLT2)
Email discussion list for CITS2230: help2230
Consultation times: 10:00 - 11:00am Mondays

Assessment and important dates:

Assessment
Contribution
 Assessment Dates
 Programming project handed out
 
  Monday 8 September (Week 7)
 Non-teaching period
 
  Saturday 13 September to Sunday 21 September
 Mid-semester test
20%
  3:00 - 4:30pm Monday 22 September (Week 8, during the lecture)
 Programming project due
40%
  noon Friday 17 October (Week 11)
 Final exam
40%
  2 hours, November

Before undertaking this unit, students are strongly encouraged to read:

Students who get less than 25/60 in the exam and test combined will be deemed to have failed CITS2230.

Tutorials:

One hour tutorials will be held fortnightly, in Weeks 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, and 12. Tutorial sheets will be available on the unit web page. Although not contributing directly to your assessment, the form of questions discussed in tutorial sessions will be typical of those in the final exam. Tutorials will be held in Room 1.24. Written sample solutions to tutorial questions will not be provided.

Revision tutorials in Week 13 will discuss questions on the sample exam paper: times and locations will be announced nearer the time.

Lab and project work:

Practical work is a very important component of this unit, both in weekly lab sessions that will reinforce lecture material and in project material that requires you to increase the depth of your knowledge. This unit has reserved a number of supervised 2-hour weekly periods in which you are expected to undertake the lab and project work. Lab sessions will be held in Lab 2.03: they will commence in Week 2.

Completion of the lab sheets is essential for satisfactory progress in this unit. Moreover, while you are welcome to undertake CITS2230 work on your home computers, this should not be seen as a substitute for attendance at supervised lab sessions.

Required textbook for 2008:

Operating systems is a rapidly expanding field, and because of this, keeping up with the current literature can be a huge task. Details of our required textbook are provided below; it is available for purchase from ?. Copies are also held on Closed Reserve in the Maths & Physical Sciences Library.

We will be using the 5th edition of this textbook, but if you can find a 2nd-hand copy of a recent earlier edition, it should suffice. Additional reading material will be handed out, or placed online, during the unit.



Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles
William Stallings
5th edition, 2005
ISBN 0-13-127837-1

Visit the UWA Computer Science home page School of Computer Science & Software Engineering
The University of Western Australia
Crawley, Western Australia, 6009.
Phone: +61 8 9380 2716 - Fax: +61 8 9380 1089.
CRICOS provider code 00126G
 Valid HTML 4.01!