CS439 Spring 2013 Project Information

Overview

There will be five projects for this class, each emphasizing a different set of important skills. You will begin by writing a shell. Your other projects will exercise your knowledge of threads, user programs, virtual memory, and file systems.
You will work on all of these projects in teams of two or more (as specified in each project). You are responsible for forming a team with someone with whom you will work well and resolving any problems that arise during the partnership is your responsibility. If you are unable to resolve a serious problem, the instructor will arbitrate.

Your team must follow a pair programming methodology. In particular, both members of the team must work together to understand the problem, design your solution, enter code, and test your solution. For code entry, one member should type while the other observes, detects tactical coding defects, and thinks strategically about the overall design. These roles must be frequently swapped. You might also want to consider the XP strategy of designing your tests before you design your solutions. In general, studies [1, 2] suggest that pair programming works well: (1) counter-intuitively two programmers working together at one keyboard produce about as much functionality as two programmers working apart at two keyboards, (2) the code produced in this manner is of higher quality than individually programmed code, and (3) in an educational setting both team members learn more than they would separately. Note that for this project, these advantages of pair programming over disjoint work are especially likely to apply: it is vital that both team members understand all aspects of the implementation. Also be aware that the exams will have questions that required intimate knowledge of the project.

The projects will be challenging. We hope they will be very satisfying. The instructor, TAs, and proctor will work to help you succeed on these challenging projects. Although the scope of the projects is ambitious, we will provide a framework to guide your efforts and to ensure that you don't have to spend a lot of time building uninteresting "glue" code. Our hope and expectation is that everyone that works hard on these projects will succeed. If you have other ideas for improving the project, please let us know. Good luck!

Notes:

2013-02-28: The Stack Check signup page is available. Please be certain to signup according to the posted instructions, and you must signup for a time by Saturday, 3/2, at 5p.
2013-02-26: I annotated the directions for hex_dump() and took a picture. Each item on the stack is color-coded to match the corresponding item in the directions. I hope it helps!
2013-2-03: We use a script to expand and compile your turned in archive. You may check to see if your archive will compile by first using turnin --verify to retrieve your archive from turnin and then using this script to expand and compile your code.
2013-1-23: I have written the first project, but details of the others are still being worked out. The relative weights of all projects and the due dates may change, perhaps significantly. I will try to work out the details and finalize things soon. However, even after I have finalized the projects, I reserve the right to adjust due dates and project weights as the semester progresses.

Projects will be graded according to the grading criteria found here. All code must follow the C Style Guide.

Group Member Evaluations: Please use this template to evalute each of your group members from this semester. Evaluations must be turned in by 5/6/2013 at 8a. Participation is mandatory.

Schedule

Projects	Objectives	Due	Relative Weight
Project 0: A Mini Shell	Become familiar with shells, fork(), exec(), and signals	Feb 1	10
Project 1: Threads	Understanding interrupts, thread state, and thread scheduling	Feb 15	20
Project 2: User Programs	Understanding how user programs interact with the OS	Mar 4/Mar22	20
Project 3: Virtual Memory	Understanding paging, page replacement, swapping, and other virtual memory concepts.	Apr 12	25
Project 4: File Systems	Understanding file systems, including directory structure, file growth, and multithreading	May 3	25