On a tangent note, is there a catalogue of unlisted MIT courses such as this one?
MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#32I did this course after someone mentioned in here a year ago, and have recommended it to a lot of people since. It's a very well structured and also up to date providing a good intro to RISC-V. I came across a compiler bug when doing the course with gcc outputting incorrect ASM which was quite exciting as I've never come across one in the wild before. I really should check if that's been fixed and report it if not.
How much time did you invest into this course? Did you do all of the readings, labs, and view all lectures? In how much time?
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, thank MIT... and consider donating.
The MIT endowment made $9 billion in profit last year, they don't need your $5 to keep releasing their course materials. It's basically marketing anyway. https://news.mit.edu/2021/mit-put-unexpected-gains-work-imme...
The endowment isn't there just to pay for OCW, and the market returns last year are not the returns every year. Also, most donors restrict their funds to specific goals.
Every R1's endowment pays for everything a school must do: campus shuttles, sending lab kits to remote students during a lockdown, funding research activities (conferences, equipment, student salaries, journal fees), supporting student clubs, building/maintaining modern facilities, allowing poorer students---those already overcoming disadvantages relative to their peers---to focus on studying instead of working, poaching leading instructors from around the globe, building reactors.
According to https://ocw.aprende.org/donate/why-donate/ (a slightly older mirror of OCW's current donate page) MIT gets half of its $3.5 million budget from the institute while the remainder comes from donors. I also don't know that MIT is allowed to dip into the OCW fund for planting trees and endowing professors, so a donation probably actually goes toward maintaining AV gear, paying undergraduates to write captions, ensuring legal compliance, paying external courseware developers and Github fees.
(Yes, they occasionally hire external writers. I did this one summer before private repositories were free. OCW hires also get MIT certificates, which unlock a lot more course materials on MIT domains if you search a bit.)
At 2 million visits per month, one percent of visitors giving 5 dollars each year falls short of their budget by 500 grand. Do you think even one percent gives? Do you think they had 2 million site visits last month?
I don't know if they monetize their Youtube channel either. I can't recall ever seeing ads on their videos.
Ultimately, a lot of people are leeching off of large donors and corporate sponsors, who get back---at least short-term---practically nothing for their support. I see the school's perspective, why give more if users (or benefactors) are unwilling to support a reasonably worthy cause?
(If you need proof that a leading university will revoke its charitable publishing of course materials, look no further than UC Berkeley, which took the ball home after being ordered to add closed captions to free lecture videos.)
In short, I would recommend giving a few coffees worth to OCW before giving to Wikipedia (for the same reason you'd pay for universal grade school whether you have children or not), and I have historically done both.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#34I did this course after someone mentioned in here a year ago, and have recommended it to a lot of people since. It's a very well structured and also up to date providing a good intro to RISC-V. I came across a compiler bug when doing the course with gcc outputting incorrect ASM which was quite exciting as I've never come across one in the wild before. I really should check if that's been fixed and report it if not.
How much time did you invest into this course? Did you do all of the readings, labs, and view all lectures? In how much time?
Even I'm planning to take up this course, since I have a full time job, if we get to know time, it would help me plan stuff.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#35OSTEP by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau is a great read for anybody interested in operating systems ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ ). The projects in their class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were mainly making edits to the xv6 OS.
Awesome textbook. My OS professor in college switched from the dinosaur book to this book to alleviate some financial burden for students.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#36The course is really neat.
Some of the candidate projects involving 9p virtio integration are suoerb ideas.
Did the CoW lab exersice for one of my courses.
The xv6 manual is very detailed as well.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#37OSTEP by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau is a great read for anybody interested in operating systems ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ ). The projects in their class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were mainly making edits to the xv6 OS.
Hands down my favorite OS text book. In a way I owe my interest and career in operating systems development to it
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#38I did this course after someone mentioned in here a year ago, and have recommended it to a lot of people since. It's a very well structured and also up to date providing a good intro to RISC-V. I came across a compiler bug when doing the course with gcc outputting incorrect ASM which was quite exciting as I've never come across one in the wild before. I really should check if that's been fixed and report it if not.
How much time did you invest into this course? Did you do all of the readings, labs, and view all lectures? In how much time?
I completed all of the material between January and May last year, looking at the timestamps on my disk.
One of the requests on the course was to include time taken for the assignments as part of the submission. This was part of the (locally run) grading script, so even though I didn't submit I still completed it, luckily.
There were 11 assignments, and each took 5-10 hours apart from a few I got stuck on - I've got one assignment listed as being 30 hours (and I still remember the frustration. I nearly got to the point of emailing the course creators to ask for help but figured it out in the end as part of it was my aforementioned compiler bug).
On top of this there are two lectures a week (often ran over time with questions) so about 3 hours per assignment and some reading material.
I had used C before this course and was very rusty. This caused me to make some mistakes in the beginning, like pulling in standard libraries rather than using the ones as part of XV6, that someone new to C would likely not have made.
So in total I'd say 36 hours of lectures, 10 hours reading, 100+ hours doing assignments.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much time did you invest into this course? Did you do all of the readings, labs, and view all lectures? In how much time?
Even I'm planning to take up this course, since I have a full time job, if we get to know time, it would help me plan stuff.
Hopefully my reply above gives you enough details to do some planning. The time taken to solve the assignments is probably quite individual though.
One thing I would say is that it was a fairly linear amount of learning, so even if you only complete part of the course you can learn a lot.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#40OSTEP by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau is a great read for anybody interested in operating systems ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ ). The projects in their class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were mainly making edits to the xv6 OS.
This was my textbook in college! It’s great