Operating Systems - Reading List

  1. J. Liedtke, On Micro-kernel Construction, In Proc. 15th SOSP, 1995.
    Background: Chap. 1 & 2
    Deadline: 01/06/06
  2. T. Anderson, B. Berhsad, E. Lazowska and H. Levy, Scheduler Activations: Effective Kernel Support for the User-level Management of Parallelism, In Proc. 13th SOSP, 1991.
    Background: Chap. 3 & 4
    Deadline: 01/13/06
  3. B. Bershad, D. Redell and J. Ellis, Fast Mutual Exclusion for Uniprocessors, In Proc. of ASPLOS, October 1992.
    Background: Chap. 6
    Deadline: 01/20/06
  4. C. Waldspurger and W. Weighl, Lottery Scheduling: Flexible Proportional-Share Resource Management, In Proc. OSDI, 1994.
    Background: Chap. 5
    Deadline: 01/27/06
  5. E.G. Coffman, and M.J. Elphick and A. Shoshani, Systems Deadlocks, ACM Computing Surveys, 3(2):67-78, June 1971.
    Background: Chap. 7
    Deadline: 02/03/06
  6. J. Huck and J. Hays, Architectural Support for Translation Table Management in Large Address Space Machines, In Proc. 20th ISCA, 1993
    Background: Chap. 8
    Deadline: 02/10/06
  7. Bensoussan, A., Clingen, C. T., and Daley, R. C., The Multics Virtual Memory: Concepts and Design, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 15, No. 5, May 1972, pp. 308-318.
    Background: Chap. 9
    Deadline: 02/17/06
  8. C. Lumb, J. Schindler, G. Ganger, E. Riedel and D. Nagle Towards Higher Disk Head Utilization: Extracting Free Bandwidth From Busy Disk Drives, In Proc. OSDI 2000.
    Background: Chap. 12 & 13
    Deadline: 02/24/06
  9. McKusick, M. K., Joy, W. N., Leffler, S. J., and Fabry, R. S., A Fast File System for UNIX, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol. 2, No. 3, August 1984, pp. 181-197.
    Background: Chap. 10 & 11
    Deadline: 03/03/06
  10. R. Wahbe, S. Lucco, T. Anderson and S. Graham, Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation, In Proc. 14 SOSP, 1994.
    Background: Chap. 14 & 15
    Deadline: 03/10/06

Reading Papers

You will be responsible for reading and preparing a summary of one paper per week, due before our weekly meetings. In order for you to get the most out of your readings, you must review the background material listed for each paper (indicated as chapters in Operating System Concepts, 7th Ed., A. Silberschatz, P. Galvin and G. Gagne. John Wiley & Sons, 2005).

Your summary should include at least:

  1. Paper title and its author(s).
  2. Brief one-line summary.
  3. A paragraph describing the most important ideas: perhaps a combination of the authors' motivations, observations, interesting parts of their design, or clever parts of their implementation.
  4. A paragraph discussing the paper's greatest flaws; maybe an experiment was poorly designed, or the main idea had a narrow scope or applicability. Being able to assess weaknesses as well as strengths is an important skill for this course and beyond.
  5. A last paragraph where you state the relevance of the ideas today, potential future research suggested by the article, etc.

You may find the following brochure useful: Efficient reading of papers in Science and Technology by Michael J. Hanson, 1990, revised 2000 Dylan McNamee.

Fabián E. Bustamante
Last modified: Thu Oct 9 11:43:19 CDT 2002