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Project: A Simple Operating System

cse.unsw.edu.au

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Re: Project: A Simple Operating System

#11

Post by lobe »

wilg wrote: post #9
lobe wrote: post #3

This is considered the hardest computing course at UNSW (with the possible exception of the security course). It has a reputation for being brutal and breaking lesser people. 'Survivors' get a t-shirt proclaiming this fact.

Do you think this is an effective teaching style?

There are pros and cons, however I think this course has its place. It is for people who know they are good at their degree, but are looking for a challenge rather than easily coasting. In this respect I think it is fantastic.

The other side is that it is brutally hard, consumes a lot of time, and leads to a lot of dropouts from the course.

It is purely an elective course. Everyone who does it knows what they are getting in to, and then come out the other end knowing they've passed the test and recommending the course to everyone else. Given that it is one of the most highly praised computing courses at UNSW (along with Security and Algorithms), it must be doing a lot right

Note this is just based off friends experiences. I have never done this course as the timing was never right

Re: Project: A Simple Operating System

#13

Post by prashantv »

lobe wrote: post #3

This is considered the hardest computing course at UNSW (with the possible exception of the security course). It has a reputation for being brutal and breaking lesser people. 'Survivors' get a t-shirt proclaiming this fact.

This was my favourite course at UNSW, very intense but that's also what made it fun! Many nights spent debugging race conditions and bugs till 4am.. The OS courses at UNSW are all pretty great.

Re: Project: A Simple Operating System

#14

Post by Eridrus »

wilg wrote: post #9
lobe wrote: post #3

This is considered the hardest computing course at UNSW (with the possible exception of the security course). It has a reputation for being brutal and breaking lesser people. 'Survivors' get a t-shirt proclaiming this fact.

Do you think this is an effective teaching style?

To be clear, the reason it is hard is the grueling pace of the project.

And to be honest, most of the individual tasks were not hard since this was a follow on to another OS course, but Milestone 6 was where shit really hit the fan for me when we needed to implement on-demand paging, and everything was easy enough in user space (catch fault, get the page from disk, map it into memory, restart the thread), but dealing with paging in an event-based kernel where you can't take a fault was pretty painful (where syscalls had a memory component) and resulted in some ghetto memory pinning.

So while this course wasn't really covering much new ground compared to the OS course we had already taken (I do recall some new material about how caches work and when you need to flush them, but not a lot else), the experience is definitely seared into my memory and I remember the details of that project like no other.

EDIT: To be clear, the lectures had a lot of new material, but it was not in the project, and .: not really tested. It did teach us about how things like VMs work.

Re: Project: A Simple Operating System

#15

Post by salem »

natdempk wrote: post #4
lobe wrote: post #3

This is considered the hardest computing course at UNSW (with the possible exception of the security course). It has a reputation for being brutal and breaking lesser people. 'Survivors' get a t-shirt proclaiming this fact.

How does UNSW compare to say MIT? The pace of this course looks fairly relentless.

I took this course, and was told that visiting a professor from MIT noted it was comparable to an advanced course there.

Re: Project: A Simple Operating System

#16

Post by sasas »

lobe wrote: post #3

This is considered the hardest computing course at UNSW (with the possible exception of the security course). It has a reputation for being brutal and breaking lesser people. 'Survivors' get a t-shirt proclaiming this fact.

What makes the security course comparable?

Re: Project: A Simple Operating System

#20

Post by salem »

wilg wrote: post #9
lobe wrote: post #3

This is considered the hardest computing course at UNSW (with the possible exception of the security course). It has a reputation for being brutal and breaking lesser people. 'Survivors' get a t-shirt proclaiming this fact.

Do you think this is an effective teaching style?

I think it was. We got good feedback from TA's who checked our progress to the milestones. At the time I went through, the work was done on the MIPS L4 microkernel, so the boot loader and much of the system init is done already, and all the work was done in C.
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