Operating Systems

Fall 2024

Documents

• Syllabus and Schedule - revised September 1, 2024
• History and Advice
• About Laptops and Phones in Class
• Course Policies
• General Academic Calendar
• Academic Honesty
• School of Computer Science and Mathematics Department of Computing Technology Goals
• Writing Center
• Counseling Services
• Title IX at Marist
• Title IX Student Bill of Rights and IX Reporting Options
• Academic Learning Center for tutoring and more

Books and Articles

• OS Concepts - Our text
• Operating Systems and Middleware - by Max Hailperin
• Linux Insides by 0xAX (Alex)
• Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau
• Project Oberon by Niklaus Wirth
• Think OS by Allen B. Downey
• Little Book About OS Development a practical guide to writing your own x86 operating system - by Erik Helin and Adam Renberg
• The Evolution of Operating Systems by P. Brinch Hansen
• Chapter Two of The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System
• All About the Windows Kernel
• HaLVM - the Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine
• Unix History - An Illustrated Memoir video by Rob Pike
• Unix History Chapter from The Art of Unix Programming
• The Unix-Haters Handbook
• Command Line Interface Guidelines
• Apple's macOS
  • CPU scheduling and performance, part one
  • CPU scheduling and performance, part two
  • Mac Developer Library
• BE an OS - The nerdiest game ever?
• The Evolution of Operating Systems by the great Per Brinch Hansen

Projects and Labs

• Embrace scholarship and write your labs with LaTeX. Overleaf is probably the easiest way to do this. I've written a template you can use. There are more LaTeX resources below. All of the labs feed into the major projects.
• Here is iProject0, the baseline TypeScript source code, to get you started. Go to the 2024 version of the source code to download a zip file or clone it so you can make a private GitHub repository of your own. You can see the (very similar) 2019 version running as an example too.
• Finally, here is advice about the project from a former student.
• Getting Started
  • Lab 0 Activity: Development tooling: GitHub and Compiling TypeScript into JavaScript
• iProject 1
  • Lab 1 Activity: Adding shell commands
  • Lab 2 Activity: Manipulating the Canvas
• iProject 2
  • Lab 3 Activity: Implementing CPU op codes
  • Lab 4 Activity: Executing one program
• iProject 3 (and a diagram)
  • Lab 5 Activity: Implementing a scheduler and context switches
  • Lab 6 Activity: Memory protection with base and limit tracking
  • Lab 7 Activity: Executing many programs in memory
• Final Project
  • Lab 8 Activity: Simulating disk hardware
  • Lab 9 Activity: Implementing a disk subsystem
  • Lab A Activity: Executing many programs in memory and from disk
• Project and Lab Resources
• Intelli J IDE - Register for a free student license. Here's the Intelli J help page for TypeScript.
• JavaScript Keyboard Key Codes
• JavaScript Keyboard Event Maddness
• Instruction Set for iProjects
• Canvas Rendering function: putImageData() - You're going to need this.
• Thomas's and Alan's memory-filling and bounds-testing program:
  

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Resources

• LaTeX
• Comprehensive TEX Archive Network
• Overleaf (formerly ShareLaTeX)
• LaTeX Tutorial from Overleaf
• TeX Stack Exchange
• TikZ package tutorial (for drawing DFAs and NFAs)
• TypeScript
• Welcome to TypeScript
• The TypeScript Handbook
• Typescript in 5 Minutes
• The TypeScript tag at Stack Overflow
• Static code analyzer for TypeScript from SonarSource
• Videos of Anders Hejlsberg on TypeScript:
  • at BUILD 2014
  • Inside TypeScript from BUILD 2012
  • The Typescript Compiler Explained
• HTML5
• Introduction to HTML
• Some Cool HTML 5 Features
• W3C HTML Validator
• Mozilla Canvas Tutorial
• HTML5 Web Storage Specification
• Dive into HTML5 Local Storage
• HTML 5 Local Storage Overview
• Introduction to HTML5 Web Storage
• The HTML tags at Stack Overflow
• The HTML5 and Database tags at Stack Overflow
• The HTML tag at Pro Webmasters Stack Exchange
• JavaScript
• JavaScript is Good, Actually - Well... modern JavaScript is.
• A Re-introduction to JavaScript
• JavaScript Style Guides
• The jQuery JavaScript Style Guide
• Some JavaScript code conventions - from Doug Crockford
• More JavaScript code conventions - from many people, managed via Git
• JavaScript: The Good Parts - by Doug Crockford
• The JavaScript tag at Stack Overflow
• The JavaScript tag at Pro Webmasters Stack Exchange
• JavaScript Keyboard Events Madness
• Treant.js - a JavaScipt library for tree diagram visualizations
• Write Tetris in JavaScript
• Git
• GitHub Desktop
• A Gentle Introduction to Git and GitHub from Alan
• Git from the Bottom up by John Wiegley
• Git Basics
• Try Github
• GitHub Guides
• Advanced: Git From the Inside Out
• Visualizing Git Concepts
• How to Write a Git Commit Message - pretty good advice
• The Issues Feature on GitHub
• Dangers of GitHub and Amazon
• 6502 Assembly Language
• Instruction Set for Our Projects
• How To Write 6502 Assembly Language from Easy 6502
• Why the 6502? Because The 6502 CPU Powered a Whole Generation! from The 8-Bit Guy
• Visual 6502
• Virtual 6502 assembler and disassembler
• In-depth 6502 Op Code Analysis (With "illegal" op codes too.)
• 6502 / 6510 / 8502 Opcode List, with details - from Nybbles and Bytes
• 6502 Circuit Diagram
• Commodore History Part One - The PET - video from from The 8-Bit Guy
• From BitSavers' Software Archive:
  • MOS 6500 Data Sheets from 1976
  • MOS 6500 Op Codes
  • MOS 6500 Architecture
• From AtariArchives:
  • Machine Language For Beginners
  • The Second Book Of Machine Language
  • Assembly Language Programming for the Atari Computers
• T-800 Heads-up Display from The Terminator, 1984
• Learn 6502 Assembly Language by hacking Mario World
• Software Development
• Software Engineering at Google a book by Abseil
• Ideas about Software Development - 6 years later
• Software Development Developments at Microsoft
• Exploding Software Engineering Myths - more from Microsoft Research
• A Microsoft Code Review - with Marist alum Jon Miller
• A big list of naughty strings - Great for testing
• Comments on Comments
• Great books about writing software
  • Code Complete by Steve McConnell
  • Beautiful Code by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson
  • Coders at Work by Peter Seibel
• Algorithms
• Algorithm Visualizations - VisuAlgo, from Dr. Steven Halim and some of his students from the National University of Singapore
• Visualizing Algorithms by Mike Bostock, creator of d3
• Sorting Algorithm Animations - Visual demos by David R. Martin
• The Sound of Sorting - Sorting Algorithm Audibilization and Visualization, by Timo Bingmann
• Data Structure Visualization Tool from David Galles
• Alan's Algorithms Course

Notes

• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapters Six and Seven
• Chapter Eight, part 1
• Chapter Eight, part 2
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve

Further Reading (and listening)

• UNIX
• From the AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System - a video of Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, Aho, Johnson, and other seminal figures at Bell Labs explaining why they invented Unix.
• Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan - video
• Overview - Bell Labs
• Creation - Bell Labs
• The UNIX Time Sharing System - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
• Early history and Evolution - Dennis Ritchie
• BSD Unix Family Tree
• How Unix erases things when you type a backspace
• Linux Kernel Map
• Inside the Linux Boot Process by M. Tim Jones
• A Fast File System for UNIX - by Marshall Kirk McKusick, William N. Joy, Samuel J. Leffler, Robert S. Fabry
• Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison - by Julio Merino
• Windows
• The Mind Behind Windows: Dave Cutler - October 2023 interview
• Introduction to Windows Kernel Security Development from Matasano Security
• Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story by Mark Russinovich
• Mark Russinovich's History with Microsoft from WIRED
• Windows Sysinternals
• Mark Russinovich's Blog
• A Brief History of Windows from NT to 2000
• Writing Device Drivers for Windows in 1994
• macOS / OS X
• Virtual Memory and Memory Pressure in 10.9 Mavericks by Jonathan Levin
• Understanding and Debugging Kernel Panics
• Example OS X crash dump
• About APFS - Apple's Next-gen file system
• XNU kernel - The XNU kernel is part of the Darwin operating system for use in OS X and iOS operating systems. XNU is a hybrid kernel combining the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with components from FreeBSD and the C++ API.
  • general Thread information
  • i386 thread state (aka PCB)
  • Traditional CPU Scheduler
  • Group Ratio Round Robin CPU Scheduler
• File Systems
• De-frag -- The Game
• All about Disk Drives
• The BeOS file system
• Practical File System Design: The Be File System by Dominic Giampaolo
• File System Perils It's amazing it ever works.
• An Inside Look at MS-DOS From Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, the original author who sold it to Bill Gates.
• 50 years in filesystems by Kristian Köhntopp
• Enterprise Computing Insights
• Batch Processing
• Transaction Systems
• Enterprise Servers
• Software Engineering Radio
  The podcast for professional developers
  I really like these folks. Highly recommended. Here are a few episodes to get you started:
  • Bruce Momjian on the Postgres Query Planner
  • Eric Brewer: The CAP Theorem, Then and Now
  • Michael Stonebraker on database systems today
  • Graph Databases
  • Moshe Vardi on P versus NP
  • Dynamic Languages for Static Minds
  • Type Systems
  • Monica Beckwith on Java Garbage Collection
  • Introduction to Aspect-oriented Programming (AOP)
  • Aspect-oriented Programming with Aspect J and Spring AOP
  • Leslie Lamport on Distributed Systems
  • Kyle Kingsbury on Consensus in Distributed Systems
  • Concurrency Part One
  • Concurrency Part Two
  • Concurrency Part Three
  • More about Concurrency
  • Dick Gabriel on the origins of LISP
  • Phillip Carter on F#
  • Joe Armstrong on Erlang
  • Martin Odersky on Scala
  • Martin Ordersky on Scala Update
  • Simon Peyton Jones on Functional Programming and Haskell
  • Interview with Anders Hejlsberg - Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#
  • Morgan Wilde on LLVM
  • The Singularity Research OS
  • Garbage Collection and Transactional Memory
• Other
• C library System Calls (libc)
• Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport on Critical Sections, the Bakery Algorithm, and Distributed Systems - Communications of the ACM, September 2022
• Translation Lookaside Buffers in x86 processors
• Threads in the Netflix Android app
• Apollo 11: Mission Out of Control from WiReD
• The EDSAC turned 70 in 2019 - Early computing from Cambridge and here's an even earlier (1951) film about it
• Deadlock Empire - a cool deadlock game
• Meltdown and Spectre - At least it's not SPECTRE
• Memory usage in Java
• Examining Core Memory in a vintage IBM 1401
• Concurrency vs Multi-threading vs Asynchronous Programming
• Real life 6502 on the KIM-1 - Written by hand!
• File Systems: The Next Generation - Atomic COWs!
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory from LWN.net
• VxWorks RTOS
• Gustavo Duarte's Software Illustrated - Lots of good OS/hardware explanations
• CPU Scheduling Algorithm Simulation
• OSDev.org Wiki
• A History of Branch Prediction
• 6502 Interrupts Primer
• A JVM Does That? by Cliff Click

Past Project Hall of Fame

• 2023
• BrenDOS by Brendan Gibbons
• LegOS by Alex Hanys
• MarshMan by Ian March
• LuchiOS by Luciano Mattoli
• 2022
• chaOS by Shannon Brady
• KeeDOS (GLaDOS enabled) by Kyle DePace
• jOSh by Josh Seligman
• 2021
• SamOS by Sam Alcosser
• rhinOS by Joe McDonough
• 2020
• AxiOS by Alex Badia
• AxiOS with Nightingale Compiler by Alex Badia
• YiOS by Yi Lin
• 2019
• TalOS by Eric Stenton
• ThanOS by Robert Liskin
• TEMPOS by Daniel Grossman
• NASOS by Will Wainscott
• 2018
• CyberCore by Kevin Mirsky
• 2017
• TienminatOS by Tien Liengtiraphan
• KaiOS by Kai Wong
• EXZOS by Zack Recolan
• ChaOS by Jack Grzechowiak
• 2016
• The Oppy by Brendon Boldt
• Krat-OS by Sami Ellougani
• Uranus OS (GLaDOS enabled) by Kyle Bradshaw
• HAXOS (GLaDOS enabled) by Liam Harwood (run in Chrome)
• 2015
• PhazonOS by Chris Barnett
• WesterOS by Zack Meath
• NathanOS by Nathan Fahrner
• Joe/S by Joe Archer
• ChellOS by Nikol Pettine
• 2014
• ctOS by Anthony Barranco
• MysteriOS Bloop by Rebecca Murphy
• 2013
• SvegOS by Justin Svegliato
• MS-BOS by Robert Nisco
• Charon by Daniel Rogers
• ChronOS in OmniChron by Chris Cordisco
• 2012
• ChronOS by Chris Cordisco
• J(OS)EPH by Joey Cabibbo
• 1978
• Apple DOS from the Computer History Museum