CPTS 360
Systems Programming, Fall 2023
Overview
This course aims to equip students with the skills to craft system software, utilize system capabilities, and construct small-to-medium scale software systems. Throughout this course, students will: (a) develop and execute C programs, (b) comprehend the fundamental methods of creating applications through libraries and interfacing with services, (c) understand memory layout, program, and process representations, and (d) implement Unix/Linux abstractions for memory management, processes, process control, inter-process communication, scheduling, file systems, and networks.
Instructor: Monowar Hasan
Email: monowar.hasan@wsu.edu
Class time: Tuesday, Thursday 09:10-10:25 AM
Class Location: Pullman Campus, Carpenter Hall 102
Office Hours (EME B53): Tuesday 11:00 AM-noon, Friday
2:00-3:00 PM,1:15-2:15 PM, or by appointmentCourse Staff (TA): Heyan Huang (huanghy@wsu.edu) Trang Mai Hoang (trang.m.hoang@wsu.edu) Albert Lucas (albert.lucas@wsu.edu)
TA Office Hours: Monday, 10-11 AM, Sloan 333 (Trang) Tuesday, 12-1 PM, Dana 149 (Albert) Thursday, 4-5 PM, Sloan 332 (Heyan)
Note: We have an MS Teams space (CPTS 360 Fall 2023) created for this class. We will use MS Teams for Q&A and communications. You also need MS Teams access to download lecture materials. The access code will be made available on Canvas and announced in class.
If you can't access Teams, please get in touch with the instructor as soon as possible.
Important: To better prepare yourself for office hours and posting Teams interactions, read carefully the excellent guides from Gabriel Parmer:
Acknowledgment
This course uses materials from Randal E. Bryant, David R. O'Hallaron, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Kung-Chi Wang, Bob Lewis, Youjip Won, Tianyin Xu, Mathias Payer, Sanidhya Kashyap, Peter Reiher, and Hugh Lauer.
Course Syllabus
The course syllabus is available here.
Textbook
[CSAPP] Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, 3rd edition, by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron.
Supplementary Book
[LKMPG] The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide, Peter Jay Salzman, Michael Burian, Ori Pomerantz, Bob Mottram, Jim Huang.
This book is helpful for Lab 4.
Schedule and Class Materials
Note: The lectures and code files are hosted on the WSU OneDrive cloud. You need access to Teams to download the materials.
Homework Assignments
Every week, practice homework problems will be assigned. Grading for practice problems will be based on submission or non-submission: total points for attempted assignments with reasonable answers will be awarded, while unattempted tasks will receive no points.
Homework problems will be posted every Monday on Canvas and must be submitted by the following Friday at 11:59 PM.
Programming Assignments
We will have five programming assignments in this course. The assignments must be completed individually.
Lab 1: Design a Unix filesystem tree simulator using C Tree data structures
Lab 2: Design a shell with basic shell programs supporting job control using ctrl-c and ctrl-z keystrokes, implementation of fg, bg, and jobs commands
Lab 3: Implement various CPU schedulers (first-come-first-serve, round-robin, shortest-job-first)
Lab 4: Basic kernel-level programming on Linux
Lab 5: Develop a web proxy that interacts with the browser and the Internet
You will need access to a Linux machine (or VM) to complete the labs. Check the following links for details about setting up virtual machines on your systems.
Apple Silicon Mac (from scratch, prebuild-images)
Note: for Windows systems, WSL is not recommended. You must install a standalone VM image.
Programming Assignment Submission
We will use GitHub Classroom for delivering programming assignments. This way, you can better manage your assignments using a widely-used version control system, Git.
For information on version control and how to use Git, see:
To know more about GitHub workflow, see GitHub Quickstart.
Using GitHub for the first time on your machine?
If you are using GitHub for the first time on your development machine, you need to authenticate your account — one way to do this is by using GitHub CLI. Install GitHub CLI using the instructions given here. Then run the following command and follow the prompts to authenticate your system: gh auth login.
Submission Workflow
For each lab, you will find a GitHub Classroom link on Canvas. Once you click the link and log into your GitHub account, find your name in the student list and click it to accept the assignment. Please double-check your name and email address before accepting the assignment. If you choose another student's name by mistake, please contact the TA as soon as possible.
A repo named
wsu-cpts360-fa23/labX-namewill be automatically created for you and hosted on GitHub with the starter code.For instance, if your username id is
cougs, for Lab 1, you should see a repository on GitHub called:wsu-cpts-fa23/lab1-cougs.
Once that clone exists, you will perform a further clone to get that private repository onto your development machine. You will complete assignments on your development computer and then "push" your work to the GitHub-hosted remote repository for us to grade.
Final submission:
Get the Git "commit id" of your work. A commit id is a 40-character hexadecimal string. You can obtain the commit id for the last commit by running the following command:
git log -1 --format=onelineMake sure that the corresponding commit is pushed on GitHub.Paste the commit id (i.e., the hexadecimal string) on the corresponding assignment section on Canvas. You should paste only the commit id (the entire string).
Note: You can submit as many times as you want; we will grade the last commit id submitted to Canvas before the deadline. Also, you can submit any commit id (not necessarily the last one) from your "pushed" Git history to Canvas. We will grade the version that you listed on Canvas.
For any questions on setting up GitHub, please reach out to TA.
Useful Resources
GDB Tutorial 1, Tutorial 2
GitHub Classroom: Tutorial 1, Tutorial 2
Got stuck? Questions about anything? Feel free to contact the instructor on Teams (preferred) or via email: monowar.hasan@wsu.edu!
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