CSE306 Home Page (Fall 2008)

Welcome to the CSE306 (Operating Systems) home page for Fall 2008. This page will be the main source of course information throughout the semester.

• Personalized Course Information Area (visit this if you are taking the course!)
• Course staff information, including office hours.
• Course syllabus.
• Schedule of topics.
• Course sign-up questionnaire (please fill out and return to Prof. Stark).
• Course software downloads area (what you actually need will be detailed in Homework #0).
• Nachos source tree, including Javadoc documentation for the kernel and the machine emulation, as well as PostScript and PDF printouts of the NACHOS source code.
• Lecture materials.
• Homework assignments:
  • Homework #0
  • Homework #1

Important Course News and Messages

Please check this page regularly for new messages. The newest messages will always appear first.

Download a new machine.jar:

A change that I made in NACHOS over the summer inadvertently introduced a deadlock, which will likely show up if you start using the -rs flag. I corrected the problem today (October 8, 15:54). Please download a new machine.jar and use that instead of the one you previously obtained.

Emailing me:

I have had reports of email to me getting bounced by my spam filters. I apologize for this, but I can't turn off my spam filters or else I will receive over seven hundred messages daily that are currently being blocked. The best I can do is to give some advice about getting mail to me:

• Don't mail me from a gmail account. Too much spam comes from gmail, and that characteristic alone raises the mail almost to the threshhold of my filters. Mail me from an on-campus email account.

• Don't send me HTML mail. Find the option in Outlook that allows you to select for each user in your contacts whether they should get HTML mail and turn that off for me. Besides being a characteristic of spam mail, I want to read plain text mail, not HTML mail, and getting a second copy of your message, except three or four times the size because of all the formatting code is a waste of network bandwith and disk storage.

• Be sure to put a descriptive Subject line in your email, and make sure that it has a return address that contains your name.

Link to cross-compilers at UC Berkeley:

The course TA (Slava) sent me this link to a web page at UC Berkeley where there are some cross-compiler binaries available. He says that although he had some troubles on his Ubuntu Linux system with the binaries I provided, the ones from the Berkeley page worked without any fiddling. I haven't tried the Berkeley ones -- your mileage may vary.

GCC cross-compiler for Mac OS X:

Markus Lacay has built a MIPS cross-compiler based on GCC 3.2.2 for Mac OS X. If you want to try it, download and unpack this ZIP file. (Since I don't have a Mac, I have not personally been able to verify that it works with NACHOS, etc., etc., but chances are good that it does.) If for some reason you need to attempt to rebuild from source yourself, I have placed the relevant GNU tarballs here. Thanks Markus!

Personalized Course Information Area:

If you are taking the course, please visit the Personalized Course Information Area, register a user ID there, and fill out the Academic Dishonesty Form.

I will be using this system to manage assignment handin and distribute grades.