CSE506: Operating Systems (v3)
Course Overview
This is an introductory graduate-level course in operating systems. The course assumes a basic level of OS knowledge (successful completion of an undergraduate course in operating systems), continuing the study of operating systems by examining the more advanced and intricate aspects of modern OSes.
Through this course, students will gain an understanding of the key concepts of modern OS architecture and its implications on libraries and software. Specifically, the course will concentrate on the memory, scheduler, and storage abstractions, giving students the necessary tools to understand the internals of modern OSes and to reason about their capabilities.
The best way to understand why systems are built the way they are built is to build such systems. To that end, this is primarily a project-oriented course. The lectures will be dominated by a discussion of OS components, with the explicit goal of enabling students to create their own non-trivial operating system that boots on and manages real hardware.
Course Topics
What Software Expects of the OS, What Hardware Provides to the OS, Virtual Memory, Interrupts, DMA, PCI, Device Drivers, Terminals, Scheduling, Storage, Filesystems, Swapping, Caching, Networking, Binary Formats, Kernel Modules, Access Control, Multi-threading, and Multi-processing.
Evaluation
- Course Project - 100
- Final Exam - 30
Only the Course Project is required, the rest of the components are optional. Students will need to attain a total of 100 points to receive an A. Participation will be judged by the instructor based on active interaction during lecture and on the course mailing list.
Prerequisites
An undergraduate course in operating systems is an informal prerequisite for this class, as is proficient knowledge of C programming and debugging. Students without prior operating systems experience or working knowledge of C will be expected to triple their time commitment in the course in order to pass. Prior coursework in computer architecture, networking, and/or storage systems will likely be of help. If you are unsure whether or not you have the necessary background or if you are unable to sign up via the web, please contact the instructor.
Books
The book recommended for this course is The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System by McKusick, Neville-Neil, and Watson. Students who do not know C should get a copy of The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie and study it cover-to-cover.
For a generic textbook on operating systems, the students can look at Operating System Concepts by Silberschatz, Galvin, Gagne and Operating Systems: Principles and Practice by Anderson and Dahlin.
Policies
For the project, you will be assigned a group. You submit your assignments jointly, as a group. You may discuss the assignment details, designs, debugging techniques, or anything else with anyone you like in general terms, but you may not provide, receive, or take code to or from anyone outside of your group. The code you submit must be your own work and only your own work. Any evidence that source code has been copied, shared, or transmitted in any way between non-partners will be regarded as evidence of academic dishonesty.
Some more-specific guidelines for the assignments:
- You may not look at code from previous years of this course.
- You may not look at code from similar courses at other universities.
Course Mailing List
Subscription to the course mailing list is mandatory.
This term we will be using Piazza for class discussion. The system is highly catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from classmates, the TA, and myself. Rather than emailing questions to the teaching staff, I encourage you to post your questions on Piazza. If you have any problems or feedback for the developers, email team@piazza.com.
Find our class page at: https://piazza.com/stonybrook/spring2026/cse506
Disability Support Services
If you have a physical, psychological, medical or learning disability that may impact your course work, please contact Disability Support Services, ECC (Educational Communications Center) Building, room 128, (631) 632-6748. They will determine with you what accommodations, if any, are necessary and appropriate. All information and documentation is confidential. http://studentaffairs.stonybrook.edu/dss/
Academic Integrity
Each student must pursue his or her academic goals honestly and be personally accountable for all submitted work. Representing another person's work as your own is always wrong. Faculty are required to report any suspected instances of academic dishonesty to the Academic Judiciary. For more comprehensive information on academic integrity, including categories of academic dishonesty, please refer to the academic judiciary website at http://www.stonybrook.edu/uaa/academicjudiciary/
Critical Incident Management
Stony Brook University expects students to respect the rights, privileges, and property of other people. Faculty are required to report to the Office of Judicial Affairs any disruptive behavior that interrupts their ability to teach, compromises the safety of the learning environment, or inhibits students' ability to learn.