This course makes no attempt to cover all the interesting topics in operating systems. Instead, we will cover a few topics in depth. The course is divided into the following general topic areas:

Virtual memory management
     Discussions of virtual memory management implementations and recent work in virtual memory for multiprocessors, NUMA machines, large virtual address spaces, and other topics.
Synchronization and communication
     Discussions of synchronization with an emphasis on monitors. Communication using remote procedure call.
File systems
     Discussions of file system interfaces and disk storage management techniques.
Protection and security
     Discussions of data security and authentication.
Extensions and fault tolerance
     Discussions of mechanisms for implementing OS services at user level, OS structure and performance, reliability and availability of OS services.
History and experience
     Historically important papers and experience reports by senior researchers in the field.

There is no textbook for this course. The course is based on a collection of journal and conference papers that describe the history and state of the art in operating systems. Papers will be discussed in class in approximately the order that they appear on the reading list below. You must read the papers before class.

Introduction

March 29, Tuesday

The Rise of "Worse is Better"
Richard Gabriel

Concurrency

March 31, Thursday

Eraser: A Dynamic Data Race Detector for Multithreaded Programs
Savage, Burrows, Nelson, Sobalvarro, and Anderson

April 5, Tuesday

Experience with Processes and Monitors in Mesa
Butler Lampson

April 7, Thursday

Threads cannot be implemented as a library
Hans-J. Boehm

April 12, Tuesday

Cooperative Task Management without Manual Stack Management
Adya,Howell,Theimer,Bolosky,Douceur

Why Threads Are A Bad Idea
John Ousterhout

Why Events Are A Bad Idea
Behren,Condit,Brewer

Virtual Memory and Protection

April 14, Thursday

Practical, Transparent, Operating System Support for Superpages
Navarro, Iyer, Druschel, and Cox

April 19, Tuesday

Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server
Waldspurger

April 21, Thursday

Native Client: A Sandbox for Portable, Untrusted x86 Native Code Exploiting Native Client
Yee, Sehr, Dardyk, Chen, Muth, Ormandy, Okasaka, Narula, Fullagar

Exploiting Native Client Video: part 1 part 2 part 3
Ben Hawkes

Virtualization

April 26, Tuesday

A Comparison of Software and Hardware Techniques for x86 Virtualization
Adams and Agesen

Exam

April 28, Thursday

Midterm -- in class
solutions

Local File Systems

May 3, Tuesday

Generalized File System Dependencies (slides)
Frost, Mammarella, Kohler, de los Reyes, Hovsepian, Matsuoka, Zhang Annotated copy.

May 5, Thursday

Rethink the Sync (slides)
Nightingale, Veeraraghavan, Chen, Flinn Annotated copy.

Livelock

May 10, Tuesday

Eliminating Receive Livelock in an Interrupt-Driven Kernel
Mogul and Ramakrishnan. Annotated copy.

Remote File System

May 12, Thursday

Design and Implementation of the SUN Network Filesystem
Sandberg et al. Annotated copy.

Leases: An Efficient Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Distributed File Cache Consistency
Gray and Cheriton. Annotated copy.

May 17, Tuesday

A Low-Bandwidth Network File System
Muthitacharoen, Chen, and Mazieres Annotated copy.

MapReduce

May 19, Thursday

MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
Dean and Ghemawat Annotated copy.

MapReduce: A major step backwards
DeWitt and Stonebraker

Misc

May 24, Tuesday

Cycles, Cells and Platters: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs.
Nightingale, Douceur, and Orgovan

May 26, Thursday

Macho: Programming With Man Pages
Cozzie, Finnicum, and King

Disks Are Like Snowflakes: No Two Are Alike
Krevat, Tucek, and Ganger

Benchmarking File System Benchmarking: It *IS* Rocket Science
Tarasov, Bhanage, Zadok, and Seltzer

Exam

May 31, Tuesday

Final -- in class