CPSC 508 Graduate Operating Systems
2019 Winter Term 1

Week	Date	Topic	Reading and Assignments
1	9/3	Class Cancelled for Orientation and Imagine UBC
	9/5	Course Introduction	First Day Handout Hand: Are Virtual Machine Monitors Microkernels Done Right? Heiser: Are Virtual-Machine Monitors Microkernels Done Right?
2	9/10	The Beginning of Timesharing	Corbató: An Experimental Time-Sharing System Dijkstra: The Structure of the "THE" Multiprogramming System
	9/12	Early Virtual Memory	Kilburn: One Level Storage System Daley: Virtual Memory, Processes, and Sharing in MULTICS Bensoussan: The Multics Virtual Memory:Concepts and Design
3	9/17	Microkernels	Rashid: From RIG to Accent to Mach: The Evolution of a Network Operating System Leidtke: On micro-kernel Construction
	9/19	Multi-processors Then and Now	Gamsa: Tornado: Maximizing Locality and Concurrency in a Shared Memory Multiprocessor Operating System Baumann: The Multikernel: A New OS Architecture for Scalable Multicore Systems
4	9/24	Introduction to Virtual Machines	Assignment 1 due MONDAY September 23 at 5:00 PM Meyer: A virtual machine time-sharing system. Bugnion: Disco: running commodity operating systems on scalable multiprocessors
	9/26	Cool Virtualization Techniques	Quiz #1: History and Virtual Machines Please complete paper survey Waldspurger: Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server
5	10/1	Virtual machines on virtual machine on ...	Ford: Microkernels Meet Recursive Virtual Machines Barham: Xen and the Art of Virtualization
	10/3	Moving Isolation Boundaries: Containers	Resource Containers: A New Facility for Resource Management in Server Systems Menage: Adding Generic Process Containers to the Linux Kernel 10/4: Project Proposal and Research Plan Due 5:00 PM
6	10/8	Moving Isolation Boundaries Again	Manco: My VM is Lighter (and Safer) than your Container Litton: Light-weight Contexts: An OS Abstraction for Safety and Performance
	10/10	Unikernels	Engler: Exokernel: An Operating System Architecture for Application-Level Resource Management Porter: Rethinking the Library OS from the Top Down
7	10/15	Modern Unikernels	Kivity: OSv—Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines Schatzberg: EbbRT: A Framework for Building Per-Application Library Operating Systems
	10/17	It's All about the Network	Mosberger: Making Paths Explicit in the Scout Operating System Peter: Arrakis: The Operating System is the Control Plane
8	10/22	Quiz and Component-based Operating Systems	Quiz #2: OS Architectures Please complete paper survey #2 Ford: The Flux OSKit: A Substrate for Kernel and Language Research
	10/24	Code Synthesis for Optimization	Pu: The Synthesis Kernel Hoiland-Jorgensen: The eXpress Data Path: Fast Programmable Packet Processing in the Operating System Kernel
9	10/29	OS Verification	Schedule First Project Status meeting with me Klein: seL4: Formal Verification of an OS Kernel Chen: Using Crash Hoare Logic for Certifying the FSCQ File System
	10/31	More Verification	Gu: CertiKOS: An Extensible Architecture for Building Certified Concurrent OS Kernels Nelson: Hyperkernel: Push-Button Verification of an OS Kernel
10	11/5	File Systems	Schedule second project status meeting with me! Hagmann: Reimplementing the Cedar File System Using Logging and Group Commit Rosenblum: The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System
	11/7	Network File Systems	Sandberg: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem Howard: Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System
11	11/12	Distributed File Systems	Anderson: Serverless Network File Systems Mickens: Blizzard: Fast, Cloud-scale Block Storage for Cloud-oblivious Applications
	11/14	Distributed Systems	Schroeder: Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System Rinard: Enhancing Server Availability and Security Through Failure-Oblivious Computing
12	11/19	Project Presentations	Project First Draft Due by SUNDAY, 11/24 9:00 PM
	11/21	Project Presentations
13	11/26	Wisdom	Quiz #3: Synthesis, Verification, and File Systems (oh my) Please complete paper survey Lampson: Hints for System Design Paper Reviews due by 5:00PM November 27!
	11/28	Mock Program Committee	(Last Day of Class)
16	12/3	Exam Period
	12/5
17	12/13	FINAL PROJECTS	This date is subject to change pending final exam schedule Final projects due at 5:00 PM

Papers with which I am assuming you are familiar.

• McKusick: A Fast File System for UNIX (pdf)
• Ousterhout: A Trace-Driven Analysis of the UNIX 4.2BSD File System (pdf)
• Ritchie: The UNIX Time-Sharing System (pdf)

BACKGROUND

The following papers are a collection of bits of wisdom on systems design, doing research, writing papers, and giving presentations. Some are papers you may have discussed in other classes; if you haven't read these, put them on the stack of, "Things I really should read some time." Most are quite light and won't take long.

The papers are listed alphabetically by first author and title.

• Abshire: Techniques and Suggestions for Presenters (pdf)
• Bentley: The Back of the Envelope (pdf)
• Bentley: The Envelope is Back (pdf)
• Brooks: No Silver Bullet -- Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering (html)
• Day: How to Write a Scientific Paper (pdf)
• Ferrari: Considerations on the Insularity of Performance Evaluation (pdf)
• Hoare: The Emperor's Old Clothes (pdf)
• Lauer: Observations on the Development of an Operating System (pdf)
• Levin: An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions (pdf)
• Roscoe: Writing reviews for systems conferences (pdf)
• Saltzer: The Instrumentation of MULTICS (pdf)
• Saltzer: End-To-End Arguments in System Design (pdf)
• Shoch: The "Worm" Programs - Early Experience with Distributed Computation (pdf)
• Small: Does Systems Research Measure Up? (pdf)
• Smith: The Task of the Referee (pdf)