CSC 7103 Advanced Operating Systems

Fall 2025
Live lectures in 1236 Patrick F. Taylor Hall, Time: Tuesday/Thursday 1.30-2.50pm

CSC 7103 Advanced Operating Systems, as the name suggests, deals with advanced topics in the field of Operating Systems.

Operating systems are a critical and complex piece of software that does the heavy lifting of managing computing devices for other software. It is also one of the few kind of software that has been extensively engineered, studied, refined, debated, and even overhauled for over decades. While one might consider operating systems as a mature software already, its evolution is far from complete with exciting new ideas that keep being proposed.

This course exposes students to the operating systems as a research field and study operating systems, and more broadly computer systems in general, from a design point of view. We will examine different systems in both important historical context and recent research developments. This course involves readings on classic and new papers. Topics include OS structure and extension techniques, virtualization, synchronization, communication, file systems, cloud systems, reliability, formal verification, security, and history and experience of systems.

The class work consists of a series of several individual programming assignments honing your general programming skills and up to three projects that are based on the PintOS kernel. You will learn a lot from these, but be prepared to spend a significant amount of time working on them.

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