OS Prelim, spring 1997

Summaries and other information are available from the fall 1996 OS prelim page. Also see the fall 1997 OS prelim page.

Send mail to me, Adam Costello <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>, if you discover electronic versions of papers I could not find, or find any broken links or other problems on this page.

In addition to the reading list, it might be a good idea to check out the current research of the examiners. For the spring 1997 OS prelim, the examiners were Eric Brewer and Alan Smith.

Questions

In spring 1997, the questions were:
  1. [Smith] What must an OS for a real-time system do differently than a conventional OS?
  2. [Brewer] What is a network computer, and what are its advantages over a PC? If there is a disk, what should it be used for? How would a typical large application (like Excel or Emacs) be run? How does Java fit in?
  3. [Smith] What support could the OS provide for conserving power on a laptop?
  4. [Brewer] What is wrong with RAID? (Small writes.) How has this problem been dealt with? (See Zebra and HP AutoRAID.)

Reading List

For each online paper, if there is already a stable copy in the cs.berkeley.edu domain, I just link to it. For more remote or less stable copies, I generally provide a link to a local copy, plus links to one or more remote pages (to show that I wasn't the first to put them on the web). I think copyright law allows me to make copies of papers for academic purposes. Access to local copies of papers is restricted to the cs.berkeley.edu domain. For papers available only as a hyperlinked tree of files, I don't provide a local copy.

For offline papers, the note “[RR]” indicates that the paper is available in the reading room (681 Soda). Please do not remove them from the reading room for more than a few minutes at a time (long enough to photocopy them), and put them back in the proper place.

The notes “[AMC]” provide links to summaries that I have written.

Undergraduate material

Concurrency, Scheduling and Synchronization

Communication: Local and Remote

File Systems

Virtual Memory

Multiprocessors

Distributed Systems

Transactions, Recovery, and Fault-Tolerance

Protection and Security

Operating System Structure

Specific Operating Systems

Removed from last semester's reading list:

Revealed Truth

Removed from last semester's reading list:


[AMC]  Prepared by Adam M. Costello
 Last modified: 1999-Nov-10-Wed 01:15:13 GMT
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