Assessment

By written examination 90% and coursework 10%.
Click here for old exam questions in operating systems and CS exam papers from 2009, 2010, 2011 (in pdf format).

Click here for the description of a topic for the Research Investigation essay (only for old-style, non-modular revision students) in operating systems.

Textbook

W. Stallings, Operating Systems, Internals and Design Principles,
Prentice Hall 6th edition, 2008, ISBN-10: 0136006329, ISBN-13: 9780136006329
(5th edition, 2005, ISBN 0-13-127837-1 would do as well)
See the website of the book for additional resources.

Recommended Reading

• W. Stallings, Computer Organization and Architecture: Designing for Performance, Prentice Hall 7th edition, 2006, ISBN-10: 0131856448, ISBN-13: 9780131856448
• A.S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems,
  Prentice Hall, 2nd edition 2001, ISBN 0-13-031358-0 or 3rd edition, 2008, ISBN 0-13-600663-9

Coursework

Submit your coursework in .pdf or .doc format to peng@dcs.bbk.ac.uk.

• Part 1: CwPt1, deadline is midnight 19th February 2012;
• Part 2: CwPt2, deadline is midnight 1st April 2012.

Submissions after the deadline but before the cut-off date will be capped at 50% of marks. Submissions after the cut-off date of 10 working days after the deadline will get 0 (zero) mark. By submitting the coursework

• you implicitly acknowledge that you have read and understood the sections on plagiarism in College Policy on Assessment Offences,
• you confirm that the work is your own and
• you give permission for your work to be submitted to the plagiarism-testing database used by the College.

Course Outline

Introduction: Computer architecture (CA) and Operating system (OS) overview
Processors
Processes and threads
Concurrency
Memory management
I/O and file systems
Protection and security
Distributed and parallel processing

Lectures and Slides*

• Week 1. Introduction to Computer architecture slides and problems.
• Week 2. Introduction to Operating systems slides and problems.
  
• Week 3. Problem-solving session.
  
• Week 4. Instruction sets slides. Processor structure slides.
  
• Week 5: Reduced instruction set computers (RISC) slides, SPARC instruction set.
  Superscalar processors slides.
  
• Week 6: Some more computer architecture problems.
  A good introduction to multi-, super- and hyperthreading.
  Deadline for coursework Part 1!
  

* The slides were prepared by using Patricia Roy's slides for the textbook, Adrian J Pullin's slides for Computer Organization and Architecture, and the slides accompanying Modern Operating Systems.