Lecturer: Gregory (Grisha) Chockler
Office: Ross 106
Tel: 658-5770
Reception Hours:TBA
e-mail:grishac AT cs.huji.ac.il

Assistant Teacher: Ittai Abraham
Office:Ross 105
Tel: 658-5351
Reception Hours:TBA

Assistant Teacher: Zinovi Rabinovich
Office:Ross 34
Tel: 658-5188
Reception Hours: Monday 12:00-13:00

Lecture and Exercise Locations

• Lectures location: TBA
• Exercise locations:
  • Monday 16:00-17:45, Feldman A
  • Wednesday 16:00-17:45, Feldman A

Communications relating to this course will use the OS Course News Groups. You can read the news groups using Netscape's News Reader, or programs such as rn, nn, xrn, etc.

The official moderated news group is local.course.os.ta. All messages posted to this group are filtered by the TA before they are actually posted (with the TA comments). Use this newsgroup to

• Ask TAs and the lecturer questions about the class or exercise material of the common interest.

In addition, you have a students' non-moderated news group: local.course.os.stud. This news group is for free usage among yourselves, e.g. to search for partners or share your thoughts about the solutions and useful techniques. Note, that the course teachers make no commitment whatsoever to read the messages posted in this newsgroup.

In order to make TA/lecturer - student communication reliable and efficient, please comply to the following rules:

• The moderated news group should be kept small do not abuse it. In other words, try to think yourself before you post anything;
• You should regulary read messages published in the moderated news group. Any message that is posted in this news group will be considered known by all, and will not be repeated elsewhere. To stress this point, in case when, e.g., a clear guideline concerning the exercise implementation is published in the news group, anyone who would not comply with it will loose points.
• The teaching assistants will make their best to answer your questions in two days. The maximum delay you should expect is no more than three days. If you haven't got your answer, please, raise the question at the class or during the reception hours.
• It is so important, that we say it twice: never ever try to contact TAs neither by our personal e-mail addresses, nor outside the reception hours.

You may write email to the TA directly (using the address os AT cs) only to handle special personal situations, e.g. to report about miluim.

Exercise Guidelines

There will be 6 exercises: 3 practical (programming) + 3 theoretical.
The grade for exercises will be composed of 5 best exercise grades.
Shall you choose not to submit an exercise you will automatically receive zero grade on it.

All theoretical exercises must be done alone.
You may work in pairs (but the groups of larger size are not permitted) on practical exercises.

You may write in C or C++.

Use good style and sufficient comments to make the code readable.

Your programs should work on the Linux machines. We will not check them elsewhere.

Exercise deadlines are firm. Submitting one day late will cost you 3 points. Submitting two days late will cost you 6 points. We will not accept later submissions. If there is a major computer outage, we will extend the deadline accordingly.

Make sure your code does not have stupid technical errors that will prevent us from checking it. If the checking fails, you will get a very low grade and will not be allowed to resubmit. To help you ensure that your code does not contain minor technical errors, we will publish some of our tests in advance in cases when we use automatic testing.

Keep a complete version of your programming exercise in directories named ~(your login)/OS/Ex1..Ex3. This will enable the bodkim to look there if your submission went wrong. (This may save you an exercise, however wrong submission will be considered a technical error).

Irrurim: all exercises will automatically get a bonus of 3 points to cover small checking mistakes (limited to total grade of 100) in advance. If you want to submit an irrur on your grade, you loose this bonus and the exercise will be rechecked. Irrurim will only be accepted within 2 weeks after we return the checked exercise.

Miluim: anyone going to miluim for up to 10 days must still submit all the exercises. People going to miluim for more than 10 days will be excused of one exercise (or in extreme cases 2 exercises, upon special approval). The TA must be notified in advance of the miluim period. The partner that does not go to miluim may join another pair for that exercise, rather than submitting it alone.

Grading is 40% for the exercises and 60% for the final exam. The weights of the exercises will be soon published

Cheating and copying are forms of antisocial behavior that will not be tolerated in this course. Please, be warned that TAs will perform checks through automated and manual inspection of your submitted code. Our scripts proved to be very efficient in the last year, and a few students have found themselves at disciplinary court, and got their course credits revoked. In case of a resonable suspicion of copying, the involved students will be summoned for clarification. If suspicions substantiate, their files will be forwarded to disciplinary court that will act upon the violators as provisioned in its stature.

Collaboration

We encourage you to collaborate on homework. Study groups can be an excellent means to master course material (besides, they can be fun and a good way to make friends.) However:

• You must write up solutions on your own
• You may not look at or copy other people solutions
• You may not provide solutions to be copied. Neither by allowing access (file permissions) not by creating commonly accessed copy of your solution (e-mail, newsgroups, hardcopies, T-shirt prints, etc.)
• If you do collaborate on homework, you must cite, in your written solution, all of your collaborators.
• If you use sources beyond the course materials in one of your solutions, e.g., an "expert" consultant, another text, or material other than the text, handouts and last term's solutions, be sure to include a proper scholarly citation of the source.

You must include a signed hardcopy of this collaboration declaration with every submitted exercise.

We discourage, but do not forbid, use of materials from terms prior to Spring 2003 to which a student may have access. Use of such material requires a proper scholarly citation; omission of such citation will be taken as a priori evidence of plagiarism subject to serious penalty.

Plagiarism, cheating, and similar anti-intellectual behavior are serious violations of academic ethics and will be correspondingly penalized. If you are concerned about a possible violation of this kind, please talk with your TA and/or a Lecturer. We understand the pressure that students may experience while at HUJI, and we will try to help as best as we can. It is better if you take the initiative to contact us in such cases, rather than vice-versa.

How a student can protect herself/himself from unauthorized copying? The simplest way is to create a group whose members will be the partners in exercise solving.
To create a group, one uses the command group which is interactive and very intuitive. Once you get the group> prompt, you create the group by specifying the following command: create group_name login to create a new group with the specified name being owned by the specified login. Other logins can later be added to the group.
Once you've created the group, you change the permission mode of your OS exercise directory to be searchable only by the owner and member(s) of his/her group by using chmod command.
This way you ensure that unathortized persons will not be able to see the content of your exercise directory, and your legally approved partners will have an access to it.

Exercise Submission

For each exercise please submit a signed hardcopy collaboration declaration in the course box.

For each exercise you will submit a tar file containing the following:

1. A file called "README", with
   • The first line should contain only the logins of the exercise authors.
   • A short general description of the exercise.
   • A list of submitted files and their descriptions.
   • Anything else that is specified explicitly in the exercise definition.
2. A makefile called "Makefile" that generates all the executables and libraries from the submitted source files. It should also work if we copy all the files (including the makefile) to our directory.
3. The source files. Do not submit executable and object files.

Once everything is ready, submit your files on-line.

Your grades will be available on-line immediately when we finish checking the exercises.