| Instructor | David Ferry, Jolley Hall 425, Homepage |
| Course Web Site | http://cse.wustl.edu/~ferryd/courses/cse522/ |
| Course meeting times | Tuesday & Thursday 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM, Lopata Hall 201 / Urbauer 115 |
| Midterm exam |
2:30 on March 10th, Lopata Hall 201 |
| Final exam |
May 11, 2016 3:30 - 5:30, regular classroom |
| Office hours | by appointment due to ongoing construction |
The purpose of this course is for each student to:
The class taught in the Spring 2016 semester should be considered a trial run of the course. Hiccups are to be expected as the class finds new and exciting ways to break course exercises and the instructor tries to fine-tune the content and scope of each class period.
Most class periods are accompanied by suggested readings. The Linux kernel is amazing in that many of the discussions and disagreements of the original developers have been saved verbatim in repositories such as the the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) or documented by firsthand witnesses at sites such as lwn.net. It is the instructor's goal that the course textbook can be used as a technical reference for kernel mechanisms, and that supplemental readings can be used to understand the particular design choices made in the course of kernel development.
A tentative course schedule is below. Note that this schedule may change over the course of the semester. When changes occur, students will be notified in class and given enough advance notice so that readings and other preparation may be accommodated.
There will be two lab assignments for this course. The purpose of these labs is to apply course concepts and to evaluate competing design alternatives for kernel mechanisms. As such, each lab will require a written report detailing your findings in addition to a code submission.
Each lab will be completed in a team of two or three students, and teams may be different for each lab. Students from different teams may discuss the lab assignments only during course meeting times. Students from the same team are of course encouraged to discuss and work on lab assignments at any time.
Labs submitted on time (as determined by email time stamp) will be given full credit. Labs submitted up to 24 hours late will be given a ten percent penalty. Labs submitted between 24 and 48 hours late will be given a twenty percent penalty. Labs submitted after 48 hours late will not be given credit, except in the case of extenuating circumstances pre-approved by the instructor.
The following labs have been so far assigned:
The final project for this course is for a team of two or three students to propose and complete their own significant modification to the Linux kernel. This might be an entirely new capability or it might be an alteration to an existing functionality. The students will evaluate the effectiveness of their modification through the creation of user program test cases that successfully demonstrate the new behavior. Students are encouraged to look to their own interests and/or research projects for inspiration.
In either case, students will justify their proposal in a written document, in order to ensure that the scope of the project is achieveable. The proposal document will:
The project will be evaluated via a 20 minute presentation at the end of the semester, as well as a code submission to the instructor. This presentation should explain the modification to the class; describe the final alterations to kernel files, data structures, concepts that the students enacted; present timing graphs or other data to verify the behavior of the modified system; and include a short demo (if possible).
Past students of this course have contributed tips, tricks, and solutions to problems that they have encountered. Let your instructor know if you have something you'd like to add here!
Students should consider the in-class studios and assigned readings to be a guided tour of the Linux kernel. Like any good tour group, we want to see the sights and learn some neat highlights about who built it and what they were trying to accomplish. But, the studios and assigned readings will not make you an expert on the Linux kernel. When it comes to learning the details of a code base as deep and complex as this, there is no substitute for reading source code. Lectures and studios will come with pointers to relevant source code files, and it is expected that students will spend time absorbing the content there as well. Therefore, assigned readings are kept moderately short with the expectation that you will spend some independent time in the source code.
To be clear, you are not expected to understand or memorize every line of the Linux source. Exams will not have questions derived from the Linux source (though basic kernel concepts and pseudo-code are fair game). However, the kernel is a huge set of deeply interdependent source code files. The only way you will ever understand it is by looking through it many times.
There is one required course textbook: Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love, 2010. This is an excellent, compact, and inexpensive text that gives the reader a basic understanding of kernel design, written with the depth of a kernel veteran.
There are a variety of decent references. None of these will give you the level of competency that comes from looking at code itself, but they are very useful for starting points and clarifying problems. However, the Linux kernel is rapidly updated, so while the general information in these books is correct, details such as source code, names of files, and where files exist is likely to can and does change.
Students will require a Raspberry Pi 2 in order to complete daily studios and lab assignments. The course has been designed with the intention that students bring these devices to class, plug them in, and do some hacking there. Monitors, keyboards, and mice will all be provided for this purpose- you will need to provide the Raspberry Pi 2, a power cord, and an HDMI cable.
If you so desire, you may set up your Raspberry Pi 2 in your home or office and configure it for remote access. However, the instructor cannot support you in this, and we are modifying the kernel so you'll be lost in the dark if you reboot and can't ssh back into your machine. Also, be forewarned that some exercises will require an X11 window, so simple ssh access will not be enough to do everything remotely.
There are four activities for which you will receive credit in this course: studios, labs, exams, and a course project. Studios are daily guided assignments primarily designed to familiarize students with course concepts, development tools, and the kernel source code (i.e. knowledge and comprehension tasks). Two lab assignments will ask students to apply general course concepts and analyze kernel design alternatives. The course project requires that students propose and complete a novel kernel modification. A midterm and final exam will evaluate your technical understanding of course concepts.
Your grade will be determined as follows:
| Activity | Grade Percentage |
|---|---|
| Studios | 25% |
| Lab 1 | 10% |
| Lab 2 | 15% |
| Midterm | 10% |
| Final | 15% |
| Project | 25% |
All work assigned in this course, other than exams, is expected to be completed collaboratively. Student teams may change from assignment to assignment, but the sharing of written work or significant portions of code between teams is strictly prohibited.
Please familiarize yourself with the Washington University policy on academic integrity. Any cheating will result in a score of zero for the assignment. The course staff will make final determinations on what constitutes cheating. If in doubt, please ask first.