COMP 530: Schedule

This schedule is also available as an ical file that you can subscribe to.

All material covered in the lectures, labs, and required readings may appear on the exams.

Optional readings provide additional explanation of material covered in class that can be useful in preparing for the exams.

Initially, I will post slides, notes, or videos from the last incarnation of this course (if they exist), and incrementally replace them with the versions presented in class (perhaps with fixes after class) as the semester progresses.

Papers are only accessible to hosts in the unc.edu domain, although most are available elsewhere online.

New lecture videos will be posted in Panopto/Canvas.

The schedule of topics is tentative, and may adjust over the course of the semester.

Date Topics Notes Required Readings Optional Readings
Part 1: Operating System Overview
Mon 08/19 Administrative and Introduction
Slides [pdf, pptx]
  1. The UNIX Timesharing System (Ritchie and Thompson, SOSP, 1974).
  2. The Linux Edge (Linus Torvalds, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution 1999).
  3. Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate Summary
  4. Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate: Part II (Tanenbaum 06).
  5. Mach: A New Kernel Foundation for UNIX Development (Accetta, Baron, Bolosky, Golub, Rashid, Tevanian, and Young, USENIX Summer '86).
Wed 08/21 C Programming Review and Lab 0
Slides [pdf, pptx]
Mon 08/26 Processes and OS Abstractions
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 4.
  1. Chapter 3 of "Understanding the Linux Kernel."
Tue 08/27
Lab 0 and Integrity Homework Due. 11:59PM.
Wed 08/28 OS APIs
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 5.
  1. How Linux Kernel Prints Text on Screen (Lichtman 2024).
  2. Chapters 4, 10 of "The Design and Implementation of FreeBSD"
  3. Chapters 11, 12, and 19 of "Understanding the Linux Kernel."
  4. Delivering Signals for Fun and Profit (Zalewski, 2001)
Mon 09/02 Labor Day - No Classes
Part 2: Virtual Memory
Wed 09/04 Interrupts and system calls
Guest Lecture by Enrico Fraccaroli Slides [pdf, pptx]
 Chapter 6. Chapter 4 of "Understanding the Linux Kernel."
Mon 09/09 Address Spaces and Loading
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 13.
  1. How Linux Kernel Runs Executables (Lichtman 2024).
  2. Chapter 9 of "Understanding the Linux Kernel."
  3. The ELF Object File Format: Introduction (Youngdale, Linux Journal 1995)
  4. The ELF Object File Format by Dissection (Youngdale, Linux Journal 1995)
  5. Architectural Support for Dynamic Linking (Agrawal, Dabral, Palit, Shen, and Ferdman, ASPLOS 2015)
Wed 09/11 Virtual Memory
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 15. Chapter 16.
Mon 09/16 Virtual Memory
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 18. Chapter 20.
  1. Chapter 19.
  2. Preserving Virtual Memory by Mitigating the Address Translation Wall (Bhattacharjee, IEEE Micro, 2017)
Tue 09/17
Lab 1 Due. 11:59PM.
Wed 09/18 Virtual Memory
Mon 09/23 Well-Being Day - No Classes
Wed 09/25 Memory allocators
Slides [pdf, pptx] Hoard: A Scalable Memory Allocator for Multithreaded Applications (Berger, McKinley, Blumofe, and Wilson, ASPLOS 2000)
  1. What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You (McKinley 2018)
  2. Chapter 8 of "Understanding the Linux Kernel."
  3. Scalable memory allocation using jemalloc
  4. SuperMalloc: A Super Fast Multithreaded Malloc for 64-bit Machines (Kuszmaul, ISMM 2015)
Thu 09/26
Lab 2 Due. 11:59PM.
Mon 09/30 Review Day
Wed 10/02 Exam 1
Mon 10/07 Swapping
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 21. Chapter 22.
Wed 10/09 Swapping, Continued
Part 3: Scheduling
Mon 10/14 CPU Scheduling
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 7. Chapter 7 of "Understanding the Linux Kernel."
Wed 10/16 CPU Scheduling
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 8.
  1. The Design and Implementation of an Operating System to Support Distributed Multimedia Applications (Leslie, McAuley, Black, Roscoe, Barham, Evers, Fairbarns, and Hyden, JSAC 1997).
  2. Exploiting Unix File-System Races via Algorithmic Complexity Attacks (Cai, Gui, and Johnson, IEEE Security & Privacy 2009).
Part 4: Threads and Synchronization
Mon 10/21 Threads
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 26.
  1. The Native POSIX Thread Library for Linux (Drepper and Molnar, 2005)
  2. Scheduler Activations: Effective Kernel Support for the User-Level Management of Parallelism (Anderson, Bershad, Lazowska, and Levy, SOSP 1991)
Tue 10/22
Lab 3 Due 11:59PM
Wed 10/23 Concurrent Programming
Slides [pdf, pptx]
  1. Programming with Threads (Birrell 1996).
  2. Why Threads Are a Bad Idea (for most purposes) (Ousterhout, USENIX, 1996).
Mon 10/28 Locking
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 28.
  1. Algorithms for Scalable Synchronization on Shared Memory Multiprocessors (Mellor-Crummey and Scott, TOCS 1991)
  2. Fuss, Futexes and Furwocks: Fast Userlevel Locking in Linux (Franke, Russel, and Kirkwood, OLS 2002)
Wed 10/30 Condition Variables
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 30.
  1. Experiences with Processes and Monitors in Mesa (Lampson and Redell, Communications of the ACM 23, 2, 1980).
  2. Chapter 5 of "Understanding the Linux Kernel."
  3. Transactional Memory: Architectural Support for Lock-Free Data Structures (Herlihy and Moss, ISCA 1993)
Mon 11/04 Deadlocks
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 32.
Wed 11/06 Review Day
Mon 11/11 Exam 2
Part 5: File Systems
Wed 11/13 Disk Scheduling
Slides [pdf, pptx]
  1. Chapter 37.
  2. Chapter 44.
.
  1. An introduction to Disk Drive Modeling (Ruemmler and Wilkes, IEEE Computer 1994)
  2. Disk from the perspective of a file system (McKusick, CACM 2012)
  3. Chapter 18 of "Understanding the Linux Kernel."
Thu 11/14
Lab 4 Due 11:59PM
Mon 11/18 File Systems Basics
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 39.
Wed 11/20 Fast File System
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 41. A Fast File System for UNIX (McKusick, Joy, Leffler, and Fabry, TOCS 1984)
Mon 11/25 File System Consistency Issues
Slides [pdf, pptx] Chapter 42.
  1. EXT3, Journaling Filesystem (Tweedie, OLS 2000)
  2. Th new ext4 filesystem: Current status and future plans (Mathur, Cao, Bhattacharya, Dilger, Tomas, Vivier, OLS 2007)
Wed 11/27 Thanksgiving Recess - No Classes
Mon 12/02 The Virtual File System (VFS).
Slides [pdf, pptx]
Wed 12/04 Review Day
Lab 5 Due 11:59PM
Tue 12/10 Final Exam
8:00 - 11:00 am.

Copyright Notice: These lecture notes, homeworks, and lab assignments are part of an undergraduate course on operating systems. You must ask me permission to use these materials. I do not grant to you the right to publish these materials for profit in any form.
Donald Porter, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Last updated: 2025-04-14 11:30:42 -0400 [validate xhtml]