Department of Computer Science

Department information

 

Operating Systems S2006 / PART 1 ( )

Hardware and Operating System Overview

DEADLINE: Friday September, 29.

GOALS

• To understand the fundamental concepts of computer architecture, of operating system internals and of the execution of a program on CPU level.
• To understand the benefits and the requirements that arise from multiprogramming.
• To be able to describe the operatin system's task related to process execution

Key words: instruction cycle, interrupts, system call, hardware support, OS functions, process

MATERIAL

• Course Book: Stallings. Operating Systems, Chapters 1-4
• Slides (only in Finnish)
• See also Stallings's pages

Other materials: A.S. Tanenbaum: Modern Operating Systems. 2nd ed. 2001. Pages 1-70. Also in Dept. OF CS Library, 2nd floor.

STUDY TEAMS IN THE COURSE  (called also STUDY GROUPS)

Study teams are organised during the first meeting. Each team will have 2-4 participants, who will be working together during the whole course. The team chooses one of its members as a person in charge who is responsible for delivering the reports as well as taking care about the communication and timetables. The team is expected to work together when solving the tasks. The report can be hand written (but clear enough). It does not have to be essay, there can be also small number of lists. Do not forget to explain the details: who is doing (OS / HW), why and when, etc ...

The report must contain:

• Cover page, with participant names, number and teacher of the small group session
  
• The actual 'essay or report' of the section problem
  
• Self-evaluation part

 

A - TEAM TASK Each Team: Write a report that contains your group's answers to all of the following problem.  Organisation of the work in time 1. meeting: In a study group, study the exercises together. Think and discuss about what issues you already know, what items you need to find more information about, what information is needed, etc. You can consult the teacher of the small group session, but he will not solve the problems for you. He can gie you hints and show the right way for solveing the problem, if you are totally lost. Between the weekly practise session meetings: You may need to discuss together between the meetings to write your report. These discussion you need to organise yourselves. You may wish to use personal meetings at Exactum or somewhere else, use e-mail, irc, wiki, moodle, webCT (if you want to use webCT or moodle, please contact Tiina Niklander). You are expected to write your report before the deadline. THE PROBLEM:  HOW DOES THE SYSTEM EXECUTE A PROGRAM? A user starts a new simple printing work by typing its name into the shell's command line or by clicking an icon in a windowing environment. What actually happens in the system, when it executes this small request.  Please go through all the details of the execution. Think about the task from the operatins systems point of view. What must be done for the process? From the harware perspective cover at least execution cycle, system calls and interrupts. Please make very clear what of the functionality is provided by the hardware and what part is handled by the operating system software. Please cover also such issues as: What needs to be changed, if there are multiple processes around? What about more prosessors? Why are these changes necessary? Figures and drawing can be used in the explanations, as well.

B - EVALUATION Each team: Please evaluate your teams work as well as your own work using the following questions: Did your team work well? How can you improve your working methods? Which parts of the team's common knowledge needed improvents and how did you achieve that? What details are still unclear? How do you see the situation could be corrected? Brief description of you team process: how many times did you meet, how, what methods did you use, were all member participating actively? The evaluation has two goals: (1) to collect information about the exercises and study groups, and (2) to help study groups to make their work even better. We appriciate short answers that give the essentials in a compact form. Please try to be open minded. Answer to each question and give also your reasonings.

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Page created 06.09.2006, Tiina Niklander