ICS 612 organization

Instructor: Edo Biagioni, esb@hawaii.edu. See here for office hours.

This class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays 12noon-1:15pm online. The zoom meeting information is in the resources on Laulima.


Goals

In this course, students will:

Organization

This course has projects, presentations, and exams.

Grades are assigned based on your performance on:

Grading will use the standard cutoffs of 97% (A+), 93% (A), 90% (A-), 87% (B+), 83% (B), 80% (B-), 77% (C+), 73% (C), 70% (C-), 67% (D+), 63% (D), 60% (D-). In grading, I will be looking for evidence of understanding of the material and evidence of your ability to do work in the field.

Projects must be turned in on time, and will lose 10%/day if turned in late. You must do well in the projects to do well in this class.

Exams may be taken early, if requested at least one week before the scheduled time.

Authorship and Collaboration

In this course, students who wish to do so are encouraged to collaborate on projects, unless otherwise specified in the assignment. Groups may have up to three people and should be reported to the instructor as soon as the group is formed, and in any case no later than halfway through the project. Whatever you turn in must have been written by you and, for coding, must be your code -- if developed by a group, all authors must be explicitly listed at the beginning of the code and must be cc'd in the email submitting the project. You may only collaborate with other students who are taking ICS 612 this semester -- collaborating with anybody else will definitely be considered cheating. Some of the project solutions may benefit from information found on the web -- you are welcome to consult and use such material, but if you do so:

System

Projects will require a computer on which to install Minix. This may be a system you already own, perhaps that you are willing to dual-boot, or more likely an emulation system, e.g. using qemu, bochs, or vmware (see also a more comprehensive list of such emulators). Please email the instructor if you have any concern about this requirement. Instructions for downloading and installing Minix are here.

Textbook

The textbook is "Operating Systems -- Design and Implementation", by Andrew Tanenbaum and Albert Woodhull (3rd edition, 2006). The textbook is available from online sellers and may be available at the UH bookstore, and is also available in an online version. The textbook is described here (but the link on that web page is dead). The CD/DVD (that comes with some versions of the textbook) is NOT required for this class.

Improvements

I do re-use these course material, so I am always grateful when students can suggest improvements or corrections to any notes. I normally acknowledge authors of major new material, and do not acknowledge people who suggest minor improvements.


No Cheating Policy: any cheating will result in a grade of 0 for the assignment or exam the first time it is detected, and a grade of F for the course for any subsequent instance. There is to be no collaboration whatsoever on exams, and only collaboration within a defined group on projects and homeworks. Anything you turn in must be entirely your own intellectual contribution. This applies to the entire group in the case of group projects and homeworks.

The Student Conduct Code has more details on both impermissible behavior (see for example section IV.B.1.a of the policies, Acts of dishonesty) and possible disciplinary sanctions.

If you have any questions, please contact the instructor.