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.
• 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 you have special personal situations such as reporting miluim, please write an e-mail to the course address which will be read by the TAs, using the address os@cs.
• Please do not write to our personal e-mail addresses. Use only the course e-mail for any course related communication. Messages to our personal e-mail addresses will not be handled.

1 day: 3 points penalty.

2 days: 10 points penalty.

3 days: 25 points penalty.

4 days: 100 points penalty.

We give at least 2 weeks for each exercise. Actually doing them takes much less time, and you need to plan your time. If you start late and run out of time you will not get an extension.

We realize many of you have Moed B exams during the semester. The deadline for exercise submissions already takes this into account. Therefore, having a Moed B during the time of the exercise is not grounds for getting an extension — plan ahead and allocate time for the exercises and the studying. If you have more than one Moed B during the time allocated to the exercise, you may ask for an extension using the course e-mail address.

If you have Miluim service, you are entitled to an extension which is equal to the amount of time you lost from the exercise due to the Miluim. Other reasons such as a personal emergency will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

If you need an extension, let us know about it at least 5 days before the deadline! Only emergencies will be accepted as reasons for extensions after that.

Individual Work Policy

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, and both members of the pair must work on the exercise together.

Exercises are to be submitted electronically. For each project create a tar file called ex#.tar (i.e. ex1.tar). Submit it using the Moodle system. 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) — names and IDs.
• 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 exercises must be written in the C/C++ programming language. Using STL is allowed. 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).

We realize that checks are not perfect and we may make mistakes. Therefore the course's exercise grades are automatically given a bonus of 3 points (Note though that an excercise grade cannot exceed 100). So if your argument is about 3 points or less, do not appeal. Submitting an appeal will cause you to lose the 3-point bonus. If you make an appeal, the whole exercise will be checked more thoroughly, which also means that your grade may drop!

Corrections to the exercise are not allowed when submitting an appeal. However, in order to avoid large penalties that result from small technical errors, you may make corrections if you lost more than 20 points on a bug that can be fixed in 3 lines or less. In this case, submit the correction together with the appeal, and clearly identify the correction made. Your exercise will be tested again, but you will lose 5 points for the original mistake plus the 3 points bonus.

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, ID: studentID, studentID
  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 if exist.