CS 3750-005: Operating Systems I

Email mthomas at cs dot csustan dot edu  Put "CS3750" in the subject line of the email.

The required text for the class is: Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by R.H. Arpaci-Dusseau and A.C. Arpaci-Dusseau. The book is made freely available by the generous authors.

Recommended: "Operating System Concepts" by A. Silberschatz, P. Galvin and G. Gagne. (The 10th edition is the most recent, but is not free. The 2005 editions, the 7th, is available online to our students via our CSU Stanislaus library web site. Your choice.)

Likely to be useful, and available from our campus library's Safari On-Line subscription:

• "Learning Unix for OS X, 2nd Edition", by Taylor
• "Shell Programming in Unix, Linux and OS X", by Kochan and Wood
• "Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal", by Kissell

Likely to be useful, if you can find a copy at a price you like:

• UNIX in Easy Steps by Mike McGrath. (Other OS professors have praised this book.)

Your primary responsibility is to be an active, engaged, prepared participant in the course. There will be quite a bit of reading which will require your consistent attention. Learning and understanding are active, not passive processes. You will have to take responsibility for your own learning, and you will be expected to contribute to other's learning also. Part of your learning will involve expressing yourself, in writing and verbally.

Other specific requirements:

• You will be expected to read most of the readings before the lecture that covers that topics. The instructor may give pop quizzes on the readings.
• There will be multiple midterms and a final, covering the primary material of the course.
• There will be homework exercises.
• There will be laboratory assignments/projects to be completed during the semester. We will discuss this in more detail in class.
  

The final grade weighting of student work is estimated in the table below.  The final weights should be close to those in the table, but circumstances may arise during the semester that force reweighting.  (For example, if one of the exams proves unusually difficult, the instructor may reduce the weight of that exam and weight the other exam higher.)

If a student does not complete, with satisfactory grades, most of the assignments that require working alone, this is grounds for assigning an F or NC in the class.

CR/NC grading may be requested only by filing a form in MSR by the appropriate deadline. See the Enrollment Services web page for more information about deadlines.

Work	Grade Weight
Midterms, Final Exam	45%
Homeworks and Programming Assignments	40%
Class Activities	10%
Class participation, pop quizzes, extra credit, etc	5%
	100%

A plus and minus grading scale will be used for final grades.

The work you do for this course will be your own. You are not to submit other people's work (or any machine's) and represent it as your own. I consider academic honesty to be at the core of the University's activities in education and research. Academic honesty is expected at all times in this course.

Students who violate this policy will receive no credit on the assignment, may receive an "F" in the course (at the instructor's discretion), and a report will be sent to the university Office of Student Affairs.

A LLM, or AI, is software running on a machine and is covered under the above policy.

Video recordings of class meetings will be made available on the class Canvas site, via the Panopto application. The recordings are set to automatically delete after a month or so.

Be aware that, while Zoom will attempt to automatically caption the lectures, homonyms confuse the software that creates the captions.

The recordings are only for use of students in Spring 2026 CS 3750-005, and should not be shared with anyone outside the class.

Each student gets an automatic extension of 4 calendar days. You can use the extension on any programming or homework assignment(s) remaining during the semester (in increments that are rounded up to the nearest integer). For instance, you can hand in one assignment 4 days late, or each of four assignments 1 day late. When you hand in a late assignment, you must identify in the README file the following: (i) how late this assignment is, and (ii) how much of the total slip time you have left. No assignment will be accepted more then 4 days late. After you have used up your slip time, any assignment handed in late will be marked off 25% per day. There will be no extensions granted.

Course Learning Outcomes:

At the conclusion of this course, the student should be able to:

1. Explain the structure, functions, and components of operating systems.
2. Apply concepts of process management, CPU scheduling, and concurrency to solve problems.
3. Analyze memory management and virtualization techniques, including address spaces, paging, segmentation, and virtual memory.
4. Describe and evaluate file systems, storage, including RAID, and I/O mechanisms for persistence.
5. Use Unix commands to evaluate the privacy and security settings for files, users, etc.
6. Discuss a variety of ethical issues, including the ethical implications of improperly configured security settings.
7. Develop and apply C programming skills to design and implement operating system components. Be able to use a variety of Unix commands, including pipes.

This is a face-to-face class.

Warning: I reserve the right to make changes to the syllabus at any time during the term by announcing them in class and on the course web page.

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