CS553 Operating Systems II Spring 2007

• Instructor: Rich West
• Email: richwest@cs.bu.edu
• Office hours: M 3-6pm
  
• Office Location: MCS 289
  
• Class location: B31
  
• Lecture times: Tue,Thu 3:30-5:00pm
  
• Syllabus (Subject to change)

Prerequisites:

• CS552 or equivalent
  
• Strong programming skills -- be prepared to program at the kernel-level, so strength in languages such as C/C++ is a bonus, as is an awareness of hardware details and assembly programming.
  

Overview:

• This is a research-oriented operating systems course.
• Research papers will be the focus of this course, along with case studies of the internals of kernels such as Linux.
  
• Class members are required to present some of the papers and/or topics in this course.
• There is one large project  in this course and possibly some smaller (primer) projects, so very good programming skills are essential.


• The semester project involves:
• writing a brief proposal describing the project and what you hope to achieve,
• implementing the details described in the proposal,
• writing a report, and
• presenting your project to the class at the end of the semester.

• The semester project will be based around (but not limited to) the advanced operating systems concepts discussed in class.
• Use of Linux to implement your project is encouraged but not required. Ultimately, the decision to approve your project will rest in the hands of the instructor. However, your project should involve a topic that is related to operating systems.
  
• Students should look at research papers outside the scope of the course for additional information and ideas for projects. Appropriate papers should come from quality conferences and journals, such as (but not limited to):
• ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP)
• USENIX Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)
• IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
• USENIX Annual Technical Conference
• ACM SIGCOMM
• ACM ASPLOS
  
• IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium
• ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
• ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
  
• IEEE Transactions on Computers
• IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
• ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking
  

Grading

• class participation and quality of presentations during the course. You will be responsible for picking selected papers and/or topics of interest, presenting them in class, and discussing aspects of these papers/topics with other class members;
• class projects. This includes scope and complexity of the problem you propose in the semester project, the depth of results and/or interesting contributions, the final project presentation and the written report.
• The following is a tentative breakdown of the grades:

* The project milestone is a mid-semester report that will act as a skeleton for the final report. It should be similar to the final report with any preliminary results included, where appropriate. You should try to write your final report in the same format as the papers we will read and discuss in the course. The best papers will be selected as potential candidates for submission to conferences.

General Notes

• Everyone should read all the papers discussed in class, even if other people are presenting them.
• A good presentation involves a clear and accurate description of all the key points in the paper(s).
• You should take an appropriate amount of time to read papers and prepare your presentations before class.
• You are strongly encouraged to consult with the class instructor before making a presentation to the class.
  
• There are no exams or written assignments outside the projects and class presentations, but there may be quizzes, so beware!

Weekly Syllabus (subject to change)

• The syllabus may change depending on the time spent on different topics and whether or not new or alternative papers/readings are discussed.
• All comments, paper suggestions and topics are welcome!
• Rather than focusing on a specific set of topics and having a very structured syllabus, this year we will cover anything and everything (as long as it relates to systems!) Hopefully, this will lead to more organic and lively discussions.
  

1. "XFI: Software Guards for System Address Spaces", U. Erlingsson, M. Abadi, M. Vrable, M. Budiu and G. C. Necula, OSDI 2006
2. "A Comparison of Software and Hardware Techniques for x86 Virtualization", K. Adams and O. Agesen, ASPLOS 2006
3. "Virtualizing I/O Devices on VMware Workstation's Hosted Virtual Machine Monitor", J. Sugerman, G. Venkitachalam and B.H. Lim, USENIX 2001 Annual Technical Conference
   
4. "Security in Embedded Systems: Design Challenges",  S. Ravi, A. Raghunathan, R. Kocher and S. Hattangady, ACM TECS 2004
5. "Lottery Scheduling: Flexible Proportional-Share Resource Management", C. Waldspurger and W.E. Weihl, OSDI 1994
6. "Lazy Receiver Processing (LRP): A Network Subsystem Architecture for Server Systems", P. Druschel and Gaurav Banga, OSDI 1996
7. "Performance of Multithreaded Chip Multiprocessors and Implications for Operating System Design", A. Fedorova, M. Seltzer, C. Small and D. Nussbaum, USENIX 2005 Annual Technical Conference (See also Tech Report TR-17-04, Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, August 2004)
8. "On Micro-kernel Construction", J. Liedtke, SOSP 1995
9. "Optimizing Network Virtualization in Xen", Aravind Menon, Alan L. Cox, Willy Zwaenepoel, USENIX 2006
10. "Xen and the Art of Virtualization", B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, I. Pratt, A. Warfield, P. Barham and R. Neugebauer, SOSP 2003
11. "Labels and Event Processes in the Asbestos Operating System", Petros Efstathopoulos, Maxwell Krohn, Steve VanDeBogart, Cliff Frey, David Ziegler, Eddie Kohler, David Mazi, Frans Kaashoek and Robert Morris, SOSP 2005
12. "U-Net: a User-level Network Interface for Parallel and Distributed Computing", T. von Eicken, A. Basu, V. Buch, W. Vogels, SOSP 1995
13. "Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server", C.A. Waldspurger, OSDI 2002
14. "Cache-Fair Thread Scheduling for Multicore Processors", A. Fedorova, M. Seltzer and M. D. Smith, Technical Report, TR-17-06, Harvard University, 2006
    

Reading List

Books and Documentation Sources

• Daniel P. Bovet and Marco Cesati, "Understanding the Linux Kernel", Third Edition, O'Reilly, ISBN: 0-596-00565-2, 2005 (Strongly recommended).
• Christian Benvenuti, "Understanding Linux Network Internals", First Edition, O'Reilly, ISBN: 0-596-00255-6 (Recommended).
  
• W. Richard Stevens, "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment", Addison-Wesley, ISBN: 0-201-56317-7, 1994 or the recently revised version (Recommended).
  
• A. Tanenbaum, "Distributed Operating Systems", Prentice-Hall, 1995 (Recommended).
• Intel, "IA-32 Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual", Volumes 1, 2 and 3.
  
• Linux websites:
• The Linux source code: http://www.kernel.org/
• Linux Online: http://www.linux.org/
• Linux Headquarters: http://www.linuxhq.com/
• The Linux Documentation Project: http://www.tldp.org/
• Linux weekly news (summary of newsletters on kernel development): http://lwn.net/
• Linux cross reference (for finding your way through the source code): http://lxr.linux.no/
  
• ...and many more. Just use your favorite search engine...
• OS websites (for those wishing to write their own OSes):
• The OS Resource Center - Good source of hardware and software information, especially for PC platforms.
  
• OS-FAQ WiKi - Lots of info on bootloaders, PC emulators and hardware.
• Virtual Machines / PC emulators:
• VMware
• Bochs
• QEMU

Suggested List of Papers and Project Ideas

• Suggested papers and project ideas will be discussed in class. Additional papers from those suggested in class may be considered also.