CS140E: embedded operating systems (Engler, Winter 2020)

This is a lab-based class with no explicit lectures. We will do two two-to-three hour labs each week. You should be able to complete almost all of the lab in one sitting. Assuming it's useful I will do some kind of optional discussion section on Fridays.

By the end of the class you will have built your own simple, clean OS for the widely-used, ARM-based raspberry pi --- including interrupts, threads, virtual memory, and a simple file system. Your OS should serve as a good base for interesting, real, sensor-based / embedded projects.

We try to work directly with primary-sources (the Broadcom and ARM6 manuals, various datasheets) since learning to understand such prose is one of the main super-powers of good systems hackers. It will also give you the tools to go off on your own after the course and fearlessly build sensor-based devices using only their datasheets.

This course differs from most OS courses in that it uses real hardware instead of a fake simulator, and almost all of the code will be written by you.

After this quarter, you'll know/enact many cool things your peers do not. You will also have a too-rare concrete understanding of how computation works on real hardware. This understanding will serve you in many other contexts.

Who should take this class.

You should take this class if:

You write code well OR (you don't yet write code well AND have a lot of time to devote to the class); AND you find these systems topics interesting.

The people that found the class valuable in the past were entirely drawn from this demographic. (In particular: I would not take this course if you were looking for an easier way to satisfy a cs140 requirement.) We are trying to go as far as possible as quickly as possible with a group interested in doing so.

I would say that if you struggle building stuff and are not already interested in the topic, then it's probably better to take a different class.

With that said, I set aside the entire quarter to work on this course, so am happy to help people that need it --- some of the biggest success stories last year were from students that had an initially large gap between their understanding and the topic but started to really "get it" after some weeks of struggle.

CS140e vs CS140

CS140e can count as a substitute for CS140 (including for PhD students that need to fulfill a OS breadth requirement). It is perhaps 80% of the coding work of CS140, but likely requires a more strenuous type of thinking at some points. The main differences:

We work with raw hardware (the r/pi A+) versus a simulator. At the end you should have a simple, but actually useful embedded system you can do interesting tricks with. Most of the reading involves primary hardware documents, rather than high level discussions. The ability to read and act on such documents is a super-power that will serve you well the rest of your career: once you get good at it, almost anything is easy. Most of the code at the end (I hope) will be written by you, rather than you having to deal with a large, complicated code base. The downside is that we give up functionality that CS140 implements, the hoped-for upside is that you will have a much more thorough understanding of what we do cover. We focus much more on checking, somewhat-verifying your code rather than tossing it over the wall to TA's to grade at the end of an assignment. Most of these techniques are simple (since we only have 10 weeks) but effective and, unfortunately, appear not widely-known/used by most programmers.

With that said, you are strongly encouraged to sit in the cs140 lectures: Mazieres is incredibly knowledgeable, and will serve as a great counter-point to what we do.

Lab policies.

You should be able to complete almost all of the lab in one sitting. If not, you must complete the lab within a week. We will not accept a lab after this.

Before each lab there will be some preparatory reading, which will typically include a short set of questions you need to answer and turn in before the lab begins. This is an attempt to make the labs more information-dense by handling basic stuff outside of it, and focusing mostly on any tricky details in it.

Labs are not optional! If you are going to miss a lab you need to make arrangements with us before hand, and missing more than one or two is going to affect your grade even if you turn in the work on time. We had a more flexible policy in the past. Unfortunately, since labs typically build on each other, once people fell behind they got seriously lost. Further, this year we short-staffed for the amount of students taking the course, so don't have the resources to walk a few students each week through makeup labs.

Grading policy

We are currently debating whether there will be a final project. Grading will be adjusted accordingly:

No project: labs 60%, homework 30%, participation 10%.

Final project: labs 50%, homework 20%, final project 20%, participation 10%.

Notes:

Prelabs must be completed before class, and labs must be completed within a week to receive credit. There will be three homeworks total, which will consist of integrating previous labs and submitting working code. Participation: Based on class attendance and discussion, and newsgroup replies. Students are allowed to miss 1-2 classes, but must notify the instructor beforehand.

What to do now.

First things first: