CS 350 - Operating Systems

Reading Materials

Web Page for Current Term : University of Waterloo : Faculty of Mathematics : School of Computer Science

A Collection of Tutorials and Useful Information

Tutorials on C++, Gdb, etc.
Assemblers, Linkers and the SPIM simulator.
This provides excellent information on the MIPS hardware/software interface. Including stack frames, procedure calls, exceptions, interrupts, etc.
An Introduction to Programming with Threads, by Andrew Birrell
Some C background information useful for the assignments.

Course Readings

Extra Readings / Notes

Primary Textbook

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau.
This book is a good source for readings on material covered in class. The parts of this book are available online for free, you can get an e-copy for about $10 or hard copies for a good price. The links included below point to the individual chapters.
NOTE: Some of the API's used in this text are different from those used in our class but it should usually be pretty easy to translate between the two.

Subject	Three Easy Pieces
Introduction; Background and Overview	Intro
Threads	Dialogue Intro Threads
Synchronization	Locks Lock Use CV's Semaphores Monitors Bugs Summary Dialogue
Processes, The Kernel, and System Calls	Dialogue Processes Process API Context Switch & Sys Calls
Virtual Memory	Address Spaces Memory API Address Translation Segmentation Paging TLBs (Faster) Smaller Page Tables Replacement/Swapping Replacement Algorithms
Scheduling	Scheduling MLFQ Multiple CPUs
I/O	Devices Hard Disks
File Systems	Files File System FSCK & Journaling
Interprocess Communication and Networking	Not Covered

Additional Resource

Operating System Concepts, by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne (John Wiley and Sons), 8th or 9th edition.
For an additional resource, I've placed two copies of this text (one of each edition) on three hour loan in the DC library. This book was formerly used as the textbook for this course.