CS553
Operating Systems 2
Spring 2026

General information:

Class location/time: 64-86 Cummington Mall, PSY B41, TTh 2:00-3:15pm
Recommended Text: There is no textbook for the course. Instead, we will rely on datasheets, the Intel Software Developer's Manuals, and research papers
Weekly Syllabus (Subject to change)
Grading and Policy (Subject to change)
Mailing list: We will use piazza for online discussions

This is an advanced OS course, focusing on technical papers and case studies of modern operating systems. It involves a rigorous study of OS structure, design and implementation for real-world systems, abstractions, mechanisms and policies for future system design, address-space protection, scheduling, synchronization, and inter-process communication.
Additional topics include virtual machines and microkernels, real-time and multiprocessor systems, memory management, I/O, power management, and system security.
Case studies will involve working systems, from Linux to our in-house Quest RTOS and Quest-V partitioning hypervisor, as well as application use-cases such as DriveOS.
Other systems will be studied through research papers and source code, where appropriate.

A good understanding of C or C++ is required. A prior understanding of assembly programming will be useful, especially x86 assembly, bu this is not prerequisite knowledge.
Prerequisites: CS552 or similar introductory OS course. If unsure, please consult with the instructor.
The course will use tools such as QEMU/KVM to work with guest operating systems that we will modify and develop in various assignments and projects.

The Quest RTOS and Quest-V Partitioning Hypervisor SDK
Linux source code cross reference
"Linux Device Drivers," by Corbet, Kroah-Hartman, and Rubini, O'Reilly . This is useful to understand how kernel modules are implemented in Linux, as well as to find out about synchronization capabilities, interrupt and device management.
The following links are primarily for those curious to know how to write their own operating system:

Lots of info on bootloaders, PC emulators and hardware. This site has come a long way over the years and is very valuable if you want to write your own OS. My research group has used this site a lot.

For those wishing to find out more about PC emulators/virtualizers, the following are particularly relevant:

this has a very good user interface, like VMware's software. For getting up and running this or one of the VMware tools is probably easiest but the ones below are all very good for developing and debugging kernel code.

one of the first x86 PC emulators and still extremely valuable for OS development. Very good for debugging kernel code.

like Bochs, it's very good for developing kernel code. Relatively low-level interface but supports ARM as well as x86.

this is actually a Linux kernel loadable module that exposes the hardware virtualization features of Intel VT and AMD-V processors.

For those wishing to run a virtual machine on an Apple machine, especially those using ARM-based Apple Silicon, this is based on QEMU.

"Understanding the Linux Kernel", Daniel P. Bovet and Marco Cesati, O'Reilly, 2001 (ISBN: 0-596-00002-2),
"Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment", W. Richard Stevens, Addison Wesley, 2000 (ISBN: 0201563177).
"UNIX Network Programming", Volume 1, W. Richard Stevens, Prentice Hall, 1998 (ISBN: 0-13-490012-X).

Useful documentation on the Intel 64 and IA-32 architectures is included in the Software Developer's Manuals. These manuals are split into several volumes, and can be found here.
For help with in-line assembly look here.

November 2025