CS 350
Operating Systems
One of my favourite CS courses taken at Waterloo by far. The mix of assignments and concepts geared towards learning operating systems made the course highly interesting and busy.
The course taught everything from synchronization all the way down to memory management and I/O. The assignments allowed the student to directly apply the theory straight to the test by constantly adding new features to a basic shell OS 161 operating system.
The first assignment was about implementing locks and conditional variables and using them in a cat/mouse themed synchronization problem. The second assignment involved the implementation of primitive OS functions: fork, exec, waitpid and exit. The final assignment had the student implement memory management functions so that the OS could ‘run forever’.
The assignments were dependent on each other so that you would be using stuff you developed in assignment 1 to help you solve assignment 2 and so on. At the end of the term, this made your modified OS 161 seem like a beautiful work of art that you felt really proud of for pouring so much time in and accomplishing something.
Overall, the assignments were quite long. This was because it took a while to figure out where to start. Even though the OS theory wasn’t ground shattering, figuring how to implement it specifically on OS 161 took sometime.
My advice for those planning on taking this course: start assignments early.
Here is a little view of my operating system while it is running:
