CSEN 383: Schedule (Fall 2026)
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Subject to change. Camino is authoritative for any change announced in class. Readings are due before the session they are listed under. OSTEP = Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces.
All labs are released on a Tuesday and due two weeks later, on a Tuesday.
Week by week
| Week | Date | Topic | Reading | Due / exams |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tue, 9/22 | Introduction and OS organization | OSTEP 2 | |
| 1 | Thu, 9/24 | xv6, RISC-V, and the toolchain | xv6 book 1–2 | Group rosters due Fri Sep 25 · set up your dev environment |
| 2 | Tue, 9/29 | Processes, address spaces, the system call path | OSTEP 4–6 | Lab 1 out |
| 2 | Thu, 10/1 | Virtual memory I: paging, page tables, TLB | OSTEP 13, 15, 18 | |
| 3 | Tue, 10/6 | Virtual memory II: replacement, copy-on-write, mmap | OSTEP 19, 21, 22 · PagedAttention | |
| 3 | Thu, 10/8 | Kernel extensibility I: SPIN and Exokernel | Exokernel | Quiz 1 — virtual memory |
| 4 | Tue, 10/13 | Kernel extensibility II: eBPF and the verifier | Lab 1 due · demo 10/13–10/15 · Lab 2 out | |
| 4 | Thu, 10/15 | Scheduling I: from FCFS to MLFQ | OSTEP 7, 8 | |
| 5 | Tue, 10/20 | Scheduling II: proportional share and sched_ext | OSTEP 9, 10 · Lottery Scheduling | Quiz 2 — extensibility, eBPF |
| 5 | Thu, 10/22 | Synchronization | OSTEP 28, 30, 31 | |
| 6 | Tue, 10/27 | Deadlock and concurrency bugs · midterm review | OSTEP 32 | Quiz 3 — scheduling · Lab 2 due · Lab 3 out |
| 6 | Thu, 10/29 | MIDTERM 1 — in class, closed book | Covers 9/22 through 10/22 | |
| 7 | Tue, 11/3 | Multicore, NUMA, and CXL | The Multikernel | Lab 2 demo 11/3–11/5 |
| 7 | Thu, 11/5 | I/O, storage, and io_uring | OSTEP 36, 37, 44 | |
| 8 | Tue, 11/10 | File systems I: implementation and crash consistency | OSTEP 39–43 | Quiz 4 — multicore, NUMA, I/O · Lab 3 due · demo 11/10–11/12 · Lab 4 out |
| 8 | Thu, 11/12 | File systems II: NFS, GFS, HDFS | OSTEP 48, 49 · GFS | |
| 9 | Tue, 11/17 | Virtualization and containers | OSTEP Appendix B | Quiz 5 — file systems |
| 9 | Thu, 11/19 | Security and isolation: Spectre, Meltdown, TEEs | ||
| — | 11/23–27 | Thanksgiving — no class | ||
| 10 | Tue, 12/1 | Datacenter and disaggregated OS · final review | Quiz 6 — virtualization, security · Lab 4 due · demo 12/1–12/3 | |
| 10 | Thu, 12/3 | MIDTERM 2 — in class, closed book | Emphasis on 10/27 onward | |
| — | 12/7–12/9 | Finals week — no activity |
Papers
Five papers to read for the quarter. Each is due before the session listed, and each will be examined on a quiz alongside with the course slides.
| Read before | Paper |
|---|---|
| Tue Oct 6 | Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention (SOSP 2023) |
| Thu Oct 8 | Exokernel: An Operating System Architecture for Application-Level Resource Management (SOSP 1995) |
| Tue Oct 20 | Lottery Scheduling: Flexible Proportional-Share Resource Management (OSDI 1994) |
| Tue Nov 3 | The Multikernel: A New OS Architecture for Scalable Multicore Systems (SOSP 2009) |
| Thu Nov 12 | The Google File System (SOSP 2003) |