Instructor: Sam Kumar
Lecture: TuTh 2:00-4:00 PM, CS76 Young Hall
Office Hours: M 1:30-2:30 PM, W 11:00-12:00 PM, Th 4:00-5:00 PM, and by appointment, 496B Engineering VI
Teaching Assistants: Medha Kini and Jui-Nan Yen
Readers: Lindsay Qin, Joshua Zhu, and Alexandra Olivar
Course announcements will posted on Piazza.
Introduction to operating systems design and evaluation. Computer software systems performance, robustness, and functionality. Kernel structure, bootstrapping, input/output (I/O) devices and interrupts. Processes and threads; address spaces, memory management, and virtual memory. Scheduling, synchronization. File systems: layout, performance, robustness. Distributed systems: networking, remote procedure call (RPC), asynchronous RPC, distributed file systems, transactions. Protection and security. Exercises involving applications using, and internals of, real-world operating systems. Letter grading.
This is an upper-division undergraduate course. Lectures focus on explaining the course material. Lab sections focus on problem solving, to reinforce material from the previous lectures. Vitamins are short programming assignments that are essential for the course. Exams may cover material not only from lectures, but also from discussion and vitamins. Readings are optional, but may be useful to help understand the material.
We will use Piazza as an online discussion forum for this class. You must join the Piazza forum for this course. Important announcements will be made on Piazza.
Readings in this course are optional; all necessary content is covered in lectures, vitamins, and lab sections. We recognize that some students may prefer reading material to learn or review some course content. Thus, we provide, for each lecture, a reading selection that roughly aligns with the content covered in that lecture.
Most reading selections are taken from the following free online textbook. We refer to it as "OSTEP" (an abbreviation of its title).
The following is another textbook that we highly recommend. We refer to it as "A&D" (the authors' initials).
If you are unable to directly enroll in the course, then please follow the enrollment guidelines for computer science classes. If you would like to request a PTE to enroll in this course, then please contact me starting in week 2 of the quarter.
You are expected to follow the UCLA Student Conduct Code.
On programming assignments, the code that you submit must be your own work (for group assignments, work completed by you and your teammates). This means that you may not include code that you find online or that is produced by AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) in your submissions for class assignments. That said, we do encourage you to speak with your classmates about concepts covered in class as they relate to assignments, approaches and designs for completing the assignments, and strategies for debugging code for the assignments. However, sharing your code with classmates or looking at your classmates' code (for group assignments, classmates outside of your group) is not allowed.
Many assignments and lecture slides are based on those used in CS 162 at UC Berkeley. The instructor is grateful to the CS 162 instructors who generously allowed reuse of this material.