67808 – Operating Systems Course
Spring 2009

Exercises and Grading Policy

You are encouraged to work and submit exercises in pairs. You must submit all the 5 exercises.

Grading Policy:

Home Assignments – 40%
Course exam – 60%

Communications relating to this course will use the OS Course Forums.

The official forums.

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

• The forums should be kept small. Do not abuse them. In other words, try to think for yourself before you post anything;
• Make sure to post exercise questions only in the relevant exercise forum!
• You should regularly read messages published on the forums. Any message that is posted by the TA will be considered known by all, and will not be repeated elsewhere. To stress this point, in case when, for example, a clear guideline concerning the exercise implementation is published on the forum, anyone who does not comply with the guideline will loose points.
• The teaching assistants will make their best effort to answer your questions within two days. The maximum delay you should expect is no more than three days. If after three days, you have not received an answer, please raise the question at the class or during the reception hours.
• If (and only if) you have special personal situations such as reporting miluim, you may write email to the course address which will be read by the TAs, using the address os@cs.
• We cannot overstress this: Never ever try to contact TAs by our personal e-mail addresses, or outside the reception hours.

1 day: 3 points penalty.

2 days: 10 points penalty.

3 days: 25 points penalty.

4 days: 100 points penalty.

Students in this course are allowed (and encouraged!) to submit homework assignments in PAIRS. At the same time, each pair must work on its own!

Exercises are to be submitted electronically. For each project create a tar file called ex#.tar (i.e. ex1.tar). Submit it using the course admin system that can be reached from the administrative page. Any mistake in creating the tar, adding unneeded files, missing files (like README), README with wrong format, doing jar instead tar, lower/upper case mistakes etc. will result in 5 points penalty since these mistakes will cause the automatic tests to fail. Use the following command line in order to create the tar file:

The README file should include the following details, in the following order, each in a separate line:

• The login(s) of the author(s), comma separated (and nothing else).
• The personal details of the author(s).
• The name of the exercise.
• A list of the submitted files, with a one line description for each file.
• Any remarks you have about special cases, implementations, additional features or anything else you think the checker should know.
• Answer to exercise theoretical questions (if any).

Use the sample README as template. Do not change its structure. Any mistake in creating the README will cost 5 points penalty, since your are failing automatic testing, That includes the names and logins of BOTH students for those who submit in a pair.

All exercise must be written in C/C++ programming language including STL. You are required to use the -Wall flag to handle all warnings. No warning should appear when compiling using -Wall. For example:

> g++ -Wall program.c –o program

For more information read the manual for g++ (or gcc).

The course's exercise grades are automatically given additional 3 points (Note though that an excercise grade cannot exceed 100). A student can appeal only on a dismissal of more than 3 points. Submitting an appeal will definitely lose these 3 points, furthermore submitting an appeal means the exercise will be re-evaluated. This means your grade may also drop!

A student that still wishes to submit an appeal must write the appeal within one week after the graded homework was returned. Appeals have to be submitted to the os email, using the following format. an appeal that will not comply with this format will be automatically deleted!

• Subject: OS: Appeal ExN
  where 'N' denotes the number of the exercise you appeal.
• Your name, ID and login in the first lines.
• A list of error codes you appeal. (ERRLIST: errN...)
• An error source (ERRSRC:...) stated clearly and shortly.
• Your reason (CLAIM:...) for dismissal of these errors, stated briefly and clearly!
• Original printout or text.