Rate my first operating system assignment from 1 to 10

[PhaZe]

The due date for our first homework assignment has been extended twice because people are not getting it.

I am about 75% there, but I wanted to show everyone else this assignment.

http://www.cs.uh.edu/~acheng/hw1.s09.txt

Can use C or C++. Must compile in unix. Pre-reqs are c++ 1, 2, and data structures.

Just curious. Lock thread if not appropriate.

Btw, does anyone have good examples with pipes or forks?

My child processes are out of control

 

[esun]

I don't know, I'm too tired to adequately rate that assignment. But I do have my own stories about ridiculous homework assignments. For example, design a state machine for an elevator (with so many floors, buttons, and other various conditions) and implement said state machine in Verilog. The solution was a state machine that filled two pages when drawn and about 20 pages when written in Verilog. Also reminds me of a RF lab that started at one week and eventually dragged on to a month because it was impossible to meet the specs for a BPF at 1 GHz (on a PCB). Most people got stuck with a pass-band around 800-900 MHz (with pretty bad loss anyway) and eventually the prof just said that was good enough.

 

[degibson]

I think its a good, instructive assignment. Anyone who completes it successfully is going to have a healthy respect for concurrency control. Banker's is pretty complex, though. It would be better to start off with a pipe assignment and then a banker's assignment. You're better off using shared memory imho, by the way.

 

[PhaZe]

I am taking my university's verilog course right now and it is pretty cool.

I got lucky though because professor that always taught that class had a crazy semester long project, kind of like the one you mentioned. He has since retired and the new professor is reasonable with the projects.

 

[PhaZe]

yeah it looks straight forward on paper but there are a lot of details to cover. Banker's, pipes, least laxity, releasing resources. He didn't cover shared memory yet, so he didn't make us use it.

I forgot to mention that the teaching assistant wants us to print the output in the following format:

Line 1: "timestamp","process ID","request"
Line 2: "Available(whole system)","Allocated(Process 0)","Need(Process 0)"
..."Allocated(Process n)","Need(Process n)"
Line 3: "System information"

The thing that makes it hard is that our professor teaches us the concepts and we pretty much have to research the functions syntax and properties. (what it returns, it's parameters etc). Anything he does in class is always in pseudo code. He didn't even mention the libraries we needed to include..

 

[esun]

Originally posted by: PhaZe
I am taking my university's verilog course right now and it is pretty cool.

I got lucky though because professor that always taught that class had a crazy semester long project, kind of like the one you mentioned. He has since retired and the new professor is reasonable with the projects.

Sadly, the assignment I mentioned was not a project. It was a week-long homework assignment in addition to the 100-hour project that the course also normally involves (in our case, a wireless video conferencing system). Luckily the homework was graded more on effort than anything else (I think the prof realized how impossible they were to do in the given time).

 

[Argo]

For a college student this is a pretty tough assignment, I'd rate it a 9. That being said, if you expect to become a decent software developer you need to be able to do it.

 

[EvilManagedCare]

I'm in an Operating Systems class myself, and I can safely say I'm glad I don't have your professor

Seems pretty difficult for a one week assignment to me.