1. CS 60038: Advances in Operating Systems Design Lecture 1: Course Introduction

2. Abhijit Mondal Sumitro Bhaumik Bishakh Ghosh
Teaching Assistants
Abhijit Mondal
Office: Systems and Mobile Research Lab
Sumitro Bhaumik
Office: Systems and Mobile Research Lab
Bishakh Ghosh
Office: Research Scholar Lab (Annex)

3. Pre-requisite for this course
Undergraduate Operating System Concepts
Process and Threads
Process life cycle
Process Scheduling
Process Synchronization (Semaphores)
Memory Management (Memory mapping)
Virtual Memory Management (Page tables, Demand Paging)
File Systems, IO Systems
An Assignment 0 has been posted in the course website to recap the core of the above concepts. Please solve them individually and independently.

4. What We’ll Cover In This Course
Topic 1: OS Design 
The UNIX Timesharing System (
Exokernel (
Linux Kernel Architecture
Process Management and Scheduling
Memory management and virtual process memory 
Interrupts
Threading, Hyperthreading 
Some recent research works on OS Design 
Drowsy power management, SOSP 2015
Light-Weight Contexts: An OS Abstraction for Safety and Performance, OSDI 2016
HawkEye: Efficient Fine-grained OS Support for Huge Pages, ASPLOS 2019

5. What We’ll Cover In This Course
Topic 2: Virtualization 
Xen and Art of Virtualization (
Memory Management in Virtualization (Example: VMWare) -
Lightweight virtualization -
Container Virtualization 
Some recent research works on virtualization 
My VM is Lighter (and Safer) than your Container, SOSP 2017
NEVE: Nested Virtualization Extensions for ARM, SOSP 2017

6. What We’ll Cover In This Course
Topic 3: File System 
Unix File System -
Log Structured File System -
Networked File System (NFS) -
Data Center File System (Google File System) - sosp2003.pdf
Some recent researches on file systems
Strata: A Cross Media File System, SOSP 2017
Pocket: Elastic Ephemeral Storage for Serverless Analytics, OSDI 2018

7. What We’ll Cover In This Course
Topic 4: Some More Advanced and Recent Topics
Trusted Execution Environments, ARM TrustZone
System aspects of Blockchain -- Distributed Consensus 
Automated Log Analysis 
Machine learning on System Research 
More Research Papers
SeClaok: ARM Trustzone-based Mobile Peripheral Control, MobiSys 2018
Canopy: An End-to-End Performance Tracing And Analysis System, SOSP 2017
XFT: Practical Fault Tolerance beyond Crashes, OSDI 2016

8. Recent research papers from top OS conferences and journals
Reading Materials
"Professional Linux Kernel Architecture", Wolfgang Mauerer OOKS/ProfessionalLinuxKernelArchitecture-WolfgangMauerer.pdf
Recent research papers from top OS conferences and journals
ACM Symposiums on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP)
Usenix Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)
Architecture Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS)
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
ACM Transactions on Storage
Relevant materials will be published in the course website periodically

9. What You Can Expect from the Course
In-depth knowledge of the very recent topics in the design of modern operating systems
Virtualization technologies
Distributed storage architecture (Ex. Google File System)
Blockchain based system developments
Embedded system concepts (ARM TrustZone)
Hands-on experience of various system platforms
Kernel compiling and debugging
Handling hypervisors for VM setup and optimization
Container management - Kubernetes
Blockchain management -- Hyperledger platform

10. What the Instructor Expects from You
Attending the classes regularly and making the classes interactive
Feel free to stop me whenever you have a question in your mind
You’ll recap the basic concepts of undergraduate OS course
You’ll solve the assignments on time and by your own -- take help of the TAs (also the instructors) if required.
Keep on browsing the recent research papers published in conferences like SOSP, OSDI, ASPLOS etc. (Check DBLP)
Regularly participate in the term projects (we’ll discuss later in details).
Make your hand dirty by exploring the “nasty” codes of Linux Kernel

11. Evaluation and Grading
Mid Semester: 25%
End Semester: 35%
Term Project (TP): 25%
Assignments: 15%
Mid and end semester examinations will contain conceptual questions. You may score very high just by
Participating in the classes
Solving the assignments
Expected course load per week -- 3 hours (Classes) + 1 hour (Assignments) + 1 hour (Reading) + 3 hours (TP) + 1 hour (Meeting with the mentor for TP)

12. Every team will be assigned a topic and a mentor
Term Projects
We’ll form some teams -- number of team members will be decided based on the number of students registered in the course
Every team will be assigned a topic and a mentor
The topics are broadly some parts of the current system researches we are doing at our lab
Remote memory management
Container state management
Exploring Trusted Execution Environments (TEE)
OS state management at distributed environments
Blockchain based system management

13. Term Projects
The objective will be to get a hands-on experience of recent system researches
Meet weekly with your mentor to discuss about the project
The team will divide the tasks among the team members, every member of the team is expected to contribute in the project -- this is crucial for evaluation
If you work regularly and mark significant contribution at the project, you can expect a research paper out of it at some good system conference.

14. To Start With ...
How to Read a Paper -
How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper - _paper.html

15. Use a three-pass approach First Pass (Quick Scan):
How to Read a Paper
Use a three-pass approach
First Pass (Quick Scan):
Read title, abstract, introduction
Read the section and sub-section headings ignoring details
Read conclusion
Check the references
Get a view of the category, context, contribution and clarity of the paper

16. Take down notes whenever necessary
How to Read a Paper
Second Pass:
Check the figures, diagrams etc.
Check the unread references from the paper -- good way to know the background (only give the first pass)
Third Pass:
Give attention to the detailed content of the paper
Take down notes whenever necessary
Try to judge the paper critically -- you can even get new nice ideas (you can pass these ideas to me, will be happy to discuss and follow up)
Why do you think that the paper got accepted? Try to write a review of the paper (some of these will be your assignment  )

17. Some Fundamentals - Process Management
Consider a single-processor system. The process scheduler schedules the processes in a multi-tasking environment.
How is this process scheduler implemented? Is it a software or a hardware?
Who schedules the process scheduler?

18. Some Fundamentals - Memory Management
What is a virtual memory?
What is the basic philosophy behind the design of virtual memory principles?