CSE306 Home Page (Spring 2012)

Welcome to the CSE306 (Operating Systems) home page for Spring 2012. This page will be the main source of course information throughout the semester.

Important Course News and Messages

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

Final Exam Statistics:
The exam was graded on a 130-point scale. The highest score achieved was 118. The lowest nonzero score was 22. The statistics are as follows: FINAL (whole class ) Valid 27; Mean 77.26; Std. Dev. 24.59 In the above, "Valid" means the number of nonzero scores in the applicable category.

Final Exam:
The final exam will take place on Tuesday, May 8, 11:15AM-1:45PM, in Library W4550 (note that this is not the regular classroom). Please bring your student ID. I will not accept an exam from anyone who does not exhibit their ID.

Homework 4 grade sheets are now available.
These are now available under the Personalized Course Information Area.

The statistics are given below. Homework 4 was graded on a twenty-seven-point scale.

HW4 (whole class ) Valid 17; Mean 17.76; Std. Dev. 9.28 In the above, "Valid" means the number of nonzero scores in the applicable category.

Homework 3 Tests
The TA used these tests in evaluating HW3.

Homework 3 grade sheets are now available.
These are now available under the Personalized Course Information Area.

The statistics are given below. Homework 3 was graded on a nineteen-point scale.

HW3 (whole class ) Valid 23; Mean 13.13; Std. Dev. 5.28 In the above, "Valid" means the number of nonzero scores in the applicable category.

Week of April 9
I am recovering from surgery and will not be in this week. Professor Scott Stoller will give the lectures on Tuesday and Thursday. He will be covering material on filesystems, some of which is directly relevant to the current homework assignment. I am accessible by email, but I will not be holding office hours this week. At the moment, things are looking good for me to be back next week.

Homework 3

As indicated in the course syllabus, you should get something on on the due date (today). You may continue to submit newer versions with no penalty as long as the system allows it. Once the due date arrives, further submissions have to be emailed to me and they will go in the late bin for examination at the end of the semester, as indicated in the syllabus.

The published policy allows me to be somewhat flexible with the due date on a class-wide basis. I will not issue individual extensions, but if the submit logs indicate that there are a significant number of people still actively working on the assignment, I might let the deadline slip a bit to try to get as many submissions as possible.

Homework 2 Tests
The TA used these tests in evaluating HW2.

Homework 2 grade sheets are now available.
These are now available under the Personalized Course Information Area.

The statistics are given below. Homework 0 was graded on a two-point scale. Homework 1 was graded on a thirty-four-point scale. Homework 2 was graded on an eighteen-point scale.

HW0 (whole class ) Valid 33; Mean 1.79; Std. Dev. 0.42 HW1 (whole class ) Valid 35; Mean 26.23; Std. Dev. 7.42 HW2 (whole class ) Valid 25; Mean 10.24; Std. Dev. 4.02 In the above, "Valid" means the number of nonzero scores in the applicable category.

HW1 Comments:

I went through the HW1 submissions and left some comments for most people. Since the TA will take some time yet to do the grading, I decided to create a new grade sheet: "HW1c", where you can see the comments I wrote. Please have a look.

HW1 Solutions:

See here for my solutions to the HW1 exercises. From what I have seen so far, quite a number of people just seemed to have ignored what I said about the need for locking objects that can be accessed concurrently by multiple threads: either there wasn't any locking, or only some of the public methods used locking. If you write a program like this "in real life", it will not work reliably, and it will be very difficult to figure out what is wrong because the errors will be different every time it is run.

Feb. 6 Office Hours:

I will need to leave my office by 2:15PM on Feb. 6, so my office hours will only be from 1:30PM until 2:15PM. If you need to see me, please try to come at 1:30.

Eclipse/CVS setup issues:

There is just one so far that I've responded to multiple times: You attempt to check out NACHOS via Eclipse and you see the error message:

Cannot access /raid2/f/stark/CSE306/REPO

Solution: You need to replace the path /raid2/f/stark/CSE306/REPO by the path to the CVS repository in your own account.

Cross-compiler setup issues:

I have put here some solutions to issues that have come up multiple times.

Emailing me:

Due to vast amounts of spam mail, I am forced to use a fairly aggressive spam filter on my email. Because student email often comes from places like Gmail, as does a lot of spam email, students have sometimes had problems reaching me. What worked last semester is for me to have a special whitelisted mail alias specifically for this course, this semester. The email address for this semester is:

cse306s12@starkeffect.com

If you have problems reaching me, use the address above. Hopefully it will last the whole semester, but if a virus on somebody's PC gives this address to a spam bot, I will have to change it.

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.

Eugene W. Stark