AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

CSI 402 – Operating Systems

Section A

Spring Term 2020-2021

INSTRUCTOR Antoine Aouad, MS, MBA

[email protected]

LECTURE HOURS TTH 03:30 pm – 04:45 pm

OFFICE HOURS TTH 02:00 pm – 03:00 pm

Otherwise by appointment
Office: Director’s Office, Block A

COURSE OBJECTIVES

To clarify for Computer Science students the Operating Systems (OS) architecture and
principles and help them understand and solve real case problems. At the end of this course,
students are able to analyze any OS, design its main components, implement few of them and
propose design improvements in OS architecture.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

1. Identify the basic components of operating systems and their different provided
services.
2. Explain the history, evolution, and development of operating systems.
3. Apply the main principles and techniques used to implement processes and threads,
inter-process communication, process synchronization, and algorithms for process
scheduling.
4. Describe processes, mutual exclusion, deadlocks
starvation/detection/avoidance/prevention, control states, and transitions.
5. Simulate memory management techniques including virtual memory abstractions,
paging, and segmentation.
6. Master Uniprocessor scheduling: FIFO, SJF, ROUND ROBIN

COURSE PREREQUISITES CSI 319 – DATA STRUCTURES

CSI 345 – COMPUTER NETWORKS

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CSI 402-Section A: Operating Systems Antoine Aouad, MS, MBA

PREREQUISITES BY TOPICS
The student should have a good background in Assembly and Computer
Architecture. The student should also have some competencies with the basic
mathematical skills developed in the prerequisites on which this course will be built; these
include binary transformation and calculation.

COURSE CREDITS 3 Credit Hours

INSTRUCTION TECHNIQUE

Lecture will be used predominantly. These will be supported by handouts and problem sets.

REQUIRED TEXTS
 William Stallings, Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles. Prentice Hall, 7th
Edition, 2012.

REFERENCES
Operating System concepts by A. Silberschatz et al., Seventh Edition. John Wiley &
Sons
Operating Systems. A. Tanenbaum et al. Third Edition. Prentice Hall

GRADE DISTRIBUTION
This course involves a number of activities, ranging from lectures, assignments, quizzes,
and exams, to the midterm and final exams. All of these attributes of the course are intended
to help the student in developing his/her understanding of the material covered in CSI 402
and in providing the department and the course instructor with information on how the
student is doing. Consequently, all of these activities are considered to be vital and will be
taken into consideration while assigning grades at the end of the term. When the student
is being assigned a course grade, it is imperative that this grade accurately reflects the
student’s level of achievement and his/her mastery of the material covered in CSI 402. A
breakdown of the weighting that will be used in making this assessment is as follows:

Class Attendance (ATT) 05%

Homework (HW) 10%
Quizzes (QZ) 10%
Projects (PRJ) 10%
Class Exams (CE) 40%
Exam I (EX I ) 20%
Exam II (EX II) 20%
Exam III (EX III) 20%
Final Exam (FEX) 25%
Bonus (BON) 05%

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CSI 402-Section A: Operating Systems Antoine Aouad, MS, MBA

The following scale will be used to assign course letter grades:

90 – 100..............................................A
80 – 89................................................B
70 – 79................................................C
60 – 69................................................D
BELOW 60 ........................................F

Note: Two out of the three class exams will be counted towards the final course grade
based on the highest grades attained. Make-up exams and late assignments will be dealt
with according to the distributed course rules and regulations, which are governed by the
Department of Computer Science. However, students have to realize that in the event that a
make-up exam is granted, it would be unjust that the grantee becomes privileged over
his/her fellow colleagues in terms of extra-time to prepare for the exam and in developing
an idea about the contents of the exam. Accordingly, the make-up exam will carry an
increased level of difficulty of at least 20% from the regular exam.

COURSE COMPETENCIES
This course will start with a brief historical perspective of the evolution of operating
systems over the last fifty years, and then cover the major components of most
operating systems. This discussion will cover the tradeoffs that can be made between
performance and functionality during the design and implementation of an operating
system. Particular emphasis will be given to these major OS subsystems: process
management (processes, threads, CPU scheduling, synchronization, and
deadlocks), memory management (segmentation, paging, swapping), file systems, and
networking/distributed systems.

ATTENDANCE

For legitimate reasons only, a student is allowed to absent him/herself for a maximum of 4
contact hours from the course lectures sessions. However, any absence of more than two
sessions will be counted toward the 5% evaluation of the course grade. Absences beyond
the specified maximum limit will result in an automatic AW in the course and possibly
other disciplinary measures. An unexcused absence from a quiz will result in a zero on that
quiz. Should the student be absent from a lecture during which a problem set or a
laboratory assignment is due, it is the duty of the student to make certain that the
homework assignment is handed in on time. Failure to do so will incur a penalty on that
assignment’s grade.
Note: 5 points will be deducted from the class attendance grade for every non excused
absence.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY

The student should get familiar with the Course Rules and Regulations of the Department
of Computer Science at AUST. These are compiled and distributed to the student at the
beginning of every academic term. In particular, the student should be aware that
plagiarism, abuse of laboratory facilities, and other sorts of academic dishonesty are not
tolerated and can result in unsympathetic penalties.

The Department of Computer Science (CSI) fully acknowledges the potential significance
of students studying together. In this sense, the CSI Department does not have any
reservation to this kind of collaboration, as long as all contestants are involved in all facets
of the work, and not with each individual contributing to a fraction of the assignment.
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 CSI 402-Section A: Operating Systems Antoine Aouad, MS, MBA

Specifically, when a student submits an assignment with his/her name on it, the CSI
Department takes it for granted that the details presented in the assignment are entirely the
student’s own work, and that this student has substantially participated in the creation of
this work. If a portion of the work has been conceived by collaborative work, that section
should be highlighted and the names of the students involved in this collaboration should be
listed next to that section.

All projects and problem sets are expected to be handed in at the beginning of the lecture of
the due date. Late project/problem sets are permissible if the solution is not published yet,
but will be penalized. If a project or problem set is not submitted at the beginning of the
lecture of the due date, it will automatically be considered as late. In accordance, the
project/assignment will loose 25% of its merit. However, the student has the right to hold
on to it and submit it at the beginning of the very next lecture. If this situation is
repeated, another 25% of the total merit of the project/assignment will be deducted until the
project/assignment looses all of its merit.

PROBLEM SETS
For most part of the course, problem sets will be assigned on a weekly basis. A detailed
description of the problem set assignment timetable is compiled at the end of this handout.

COURSE OUTLINE BY TOPIC

The day-to-day topics to be covered in the table below may be adjusted as the subject proceeds, but
all examination dates are fixed, and problem set due dates are unlikely to change.

Week Session Topic Day Date (DD/MM/YYYY)

 Ch. 1 Computer System Overview
Basic Elements
1 Processor Registers
T 16/02/2021
1 Instruction Execution
Interrupts
2 The Memory Hierarchy TH 18/02/2021
Cache Memory
Ch. 2 Operating System Overview
3 Operating System Objectives and Functions T 23/02/2021
2 The Evolution of Operating Systems
Major Achievements
4 Developments Leading to Major Operating Systems
TH 25/02/2021
Ch. 3 Process Description and Control
5 What is a Process T 02/03/2021
3 Process States
6 Process Description and Process Control TH 04/03/2021
7 EXAM I T 09/03/2021
Ch. 4 Threads, SMP, and Microkernels
8 Processes and Threads TH 11/03/2021
Symmetric Multiprocessing
4-5
Microkernels
9 Windows Threads and SMP Management
T 16/03/2021
Solaris Threads and SMP Management
10 Linux Process and Thread Management
TH 18/03/2021
Ch. 5 Concurrency: Mutual Exclusion and Synchronization
11 Principles of Concurrency T 23/03/2021
Mutual Exclusion: Hardware Support
6-8 Semaphores
12 T 30/03/2021
Monitors
13 Message Passing
TH 01/04/2021

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 CSI 402-Section A: Operating Systems Antoine Aouad, MS, MBA

Week Session Topic Day Date (DD/MM/YYYY)

14 Reader/Writers Problem T 06/04/2021
8 15 EXAM II TH 08/04/2021
Ch. 6 Concurrency: Deadlock and Starvation
16 Principles of Deadlock
T 13/04/2021
Deadlock Prevention
9-10 17 Deadlock Avoidance
TH 15/04/2021
Deadlock Detection
18 An Integrated Deadlock Strategy
T 20/04/2021

19 Dining Philosophers Problem TH 22/04/2021

Ch. 7 Memory Management
20 Memory Management Requirements T 27/04/2021
11 Memory Partitioning
Paging
21 Segmentation
TH 29/04/2021
22 EXAM III T 04/05/2021
12-13 Ch. 8 Virtual Memory
23 Hardware and Control Systems
TH 06/05/2021
24 Operating System Software T 11/05/2021
Ch. 9 Uniprocessor Scheduling
25 Types of processor scheduling
T 18/05/2021
14-15
26 Scheduling Algorithms TH 20/05/2021
27 Review T 25/05/2021
28 TH 27/05/2021
15-16 29 Project Presentations T 01/06/2021
30 TH 03/06/2021
M 07/06/2021
FINAL EXAMS T 15/06/2021

Problem Sets:

Problem Sets will be assigned later on.

Projects:

Projects will be assigned later on.

DISCLAIMER: Changes may be performed to the above syllabus without any prior notification.
Copyright ©2020-2021 American University of Science & Technology - Department of Computer Science. All rights reserved.

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