CPSC 508 Winter 2 2018: Quiz #1

45 points: 15 per question

This exam is closed notes, closed papers, closed interwebs, closed everything (open brain).

Please use whatever word processing software that you'd like to write your answers, but please send me either plain text (≤ 80 characters per line) or PDF. I will be grading the quiz blind (that is, I don't want to know whose quiz I am grading), so please do not put your name anywhere in the document you submit. Instead, call the file you send me lastname.{txt,pdf} (where you fill in lastname with your own last name). Please email your quiz to: mseltzer@cs.ubc.ca. (I convert the files to randomly numbered files, grade them, and then convert the names back.)

Here are the papers we've read (alphabetical by author):

  1. Baumann: The Multikernel: A New OS Architecture for Scalable Multicore Systems
  2. Bensoussan: The Multics Virtual Memory:Concepts and Design
  3. Bugnion: Disco: running commodity operating systems on scalable multiprocessors
  4. Corbató: An Experimental Time-Sharing System
  5. Daley: Virtual Memory, Processes, and Sharing in MULTICS
  6. Dijkstra: The Structure of the "THE" Multiprogramming System
  7. Ford: Microkernels Meet Recursive Virtual Machines
  8. Gamsa: Tornado: Maximizing Locality and Concurrency in a Shared Memory Multiprocessor Operating System
  9. Kilburn: One Level Storage System
  10. Leidtke: On micro-kernel Construction
  11. Meyer: A virtual machine time-sharing system
  12. Rashid: From RIG to Accent to Mach: The Evolution of a Network Operating System
  13. Yehuda: The Turtles Project: Design and Implementation of Nested Virtualization

  1. Historical Context
  2. Based on the papers we've read, for each of the first two timespans below, what do you think were the one or two most important questions addressed? Provide 1-2 sentence justification. Then, based on where we were in 2000, the two post-2000 papers we've read, and what you know about today's computing landscape, what do you think is the most important problem that should have been addressed post 2000 (in the area of operating systems)? Again, provide a 1-2 sentence justification.

  3. VMs, Microkernels, and Multikernels, Oh My
  4. How is Disco like or unlike a multikernel?

  5. Debugging
  6. Debugging has been a concern for a very long time. Identify three papers that discussed debugging and explain what they said about it in the context of the paper (just 1-2 sentences).

Paper Survey

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