About the Course
E0-253 seeks to equip students with the a hands-on overview of the design and
implementation of operating systems.
Administrative Details
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Instructors:
Vinod Ganapathy and
Ashish Panwar (Microsoft Research
India).
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TA team: Aditya Ravishankar (raditya), Nikhil Dhama (nikhildhama),
Saurabh Girish Awinashe (saurabhg), Kishore Addala Varma (kishorea), and
Vivek Kumar (vivekkumar13).
The TA team will be the points of contact for all project related questions.
- Class hours: Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9:30am-11am,
in CSA-112. There will be two classes per week. Class will be held on MW when
VG teaches, and MF when AP teaches.
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MS Teams Link:
Join
the MS Teams group with your IISc email ID
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Textbook: This is a graduate-level OS course, and we will read a number
of research papers as part of the course. However, you are expected to be
familiar (in its entirety) with the content of a standard
undergraduate-level OS course, such as for example, the "Dinosaur book" by
Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne. For this course, we will, at times, consult the
material in the freely-available OSTEP book:
Operating Systems:
Three Easy Pieces, by Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau.
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Prerequisites: Exposure to OS and programming, as provided in a
standard undergraduate-level computer science degree. Knowledge of C
programming is a must.
Grading: The course consists of several programming assignments, one
mid-term exam, and one (cumulative) final exam.
The rough weightage of each
component will be 40% for programming assignments, 30% for midterm and 30% for
the cumulative final exam. This information is subject to change. The weightage
of each programming assignment will be announced in the last week of the
semester. In the meanwhile, you must strive to do your best in each
component. Just be informed that all components of the course are
important, and you cannot afford to ignore any one of them. You will receive
scores out of 100 for each item that you will be turning in. The programming
assignments give you hands-on experience and are where you will learn the most
in this course (assuming you do them honestly). The mid-term and final exams
help us assess your understanding of the concepts taught, as well as your
understanding of the material from a standard undergrad OS textbook. Grades
will follow this table:
| Score range |
Letter grade |
| 90 ≤ score ≤ 100 |
A+ |
| 80 ≤ score < 90 |
A |
| 70 ≤ score < 80 |
B+ |
| 60 ≤ score < 70 |
B |
| 50 ≤ score < 60 |
C |
| 40 ≤ score < 50 |
D |
| 0 ≤ score < 40 |
F |
Answer to the most frequently asked question about this course—"Is
there a lot of programming in the course?"
You're taking a systems course in the department of computer science.
Presumably, you have chosen to take this course because you are interested in
learning how computer systems work. So of course there is going to programming.
Lots of it. And it's going to be systems programming—hacking the
kernel—which can have a steep learning curve. So if you take this course,
be prepared to work hard and read and write a lot of code.