CPS 210: Operating Systems
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Class Meetings

TTh 2:50 - 4:05 in D243 LSRC

Instructor

Jeff Chase (chase@cs.duke.edu)

Final exam at 3:00 PM on 4/27 in D243 LSRC. Information sources in the exam is limited to one page of notes. The exam is cumulative, but it covers only topics discussed in class, and for which slides are posted on the topics page.

CPS 210 is the entry course in computer systems for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Traditionally the course emphasizes classical operating systems topics: concurrency, facilities for storage, communication, and protection, kernel services and structure, architecture/OS interaction, distributed systems, and practical application of operating system concepts in real operating systems. We also explore the nature of "systems" as an evolving research discipline encompassing all aspects of bridging the gap between applications and hardware. To this end we will study selected research papers, focusing on research goals and methodologies.

course policies

The course material is broken into core topics, advanced topics, and research topics.

Core topics are typical material for a high-end undergraduate operating systems course, along with some crucial topics in distributed systems and networking. Quals passes are based largely on mastery of the core topics. They include:

• Core material from trade textbooks for undergraduate OS
• Concurrency race detection
• Elements of cryptosystems (private and public key crypto and digital signatures)
• Virtual machines
• Network transports and the OS-network interface
• File system structure, logging, and recovery
• Internet naming (DNS, URLs): location, scale, and trust
• Network File System (NFS)
• RAID
• Cache consistency and leased locks
• The problem of asynchronous consensus

Advanced topics build on the core topics in some direct way, e.g., recent technology advances, new challenges brought about by changing technology, classic systems research papers, or more detailed studies of real-world examples. Most presentation of core topics in the class will occur as a "side effect" of discussion of advanced topics.

• Cluster batch schedulers
• Multi-tier Web services
• Content delivery networks (CDNs)
• Platform virtualization (virtual machine hypervisors)
• Trusted computing platforms (TPM)
• Mac OSX internals (also some examples from Windows, Solaris, and Linux)
• Object storage devices and iSCSI
• Scalable Internet services (e.g., Google)
• Utility/cloud/grid computing
• Content-addressable storage

Research topics are current areas of active research. Most presentation of research topics will take the form of seminar-style discussions of recent research papers, typically using the author's slides.

The principles and lessons from the advanced topics and research topics may be tested, but I do not expect you to master every detail.