Welcome Notices

Assignment and Help Session updates Week 7 (Posted by Thomas, Wed Jul 16)

Assignment 1: Auto-marking has run, and assignment results are mostly ready to be released. We're waiting on a small number of students who can still theoretically submit for marks thanks to medium-long extensions. We hope to release the results on Friday or the weekend.

Assignment 2: We're still setting up some technology, expect to see the submission mechanism, extensions etc set up real soon now.

Help Session: We have a help session today at 2-4pm. There was a bit of interest in help sessions on the forum, but not a lot of responses to the help session post. Come along if you're interested, online or in person. We'll be running until 4pm. See the forum for join links etc. There may be an online overflow session later in the week if we don't get to everyone today.


 
FAQ and Video for Assignment 2 (Posted by Thomas, Fri Jul 11)
From the forum questions and group creations, it looks like most of you have got started on assignment 2. Great! I've put up a FAQ as part of the assignment spec. I've also put up some hints for those still struggling to get started. A few students have recommended an assignment 2 intro lecture given by Kevin in previous years. Since that's accessible on youtube, to be fair, I should make sure everyone knows about it. I've added a link in the lectures pane.
 
Wednesday Lecture Uploaded (Posted by Thomas, Wed Jul 2)
The Wednesday lecture has now been cross-processed from Zoom to Echo360 and is available in the regular Echo360 lecture series. Thanks for bearing with us during the wild weather, and catch (some of) you in person after flex-week!
 
Assignment 2 Released (Posted by Thomas, Tue Jul 1)
Assignment 2 is fully released now, see the full spec linked in the menu.

Good luck with it!


 
Week 4 notices (Posted by Thomas, Tue Jun 24)
Lots of notices that were also covered at the start of week 4's Monday lecture.
  • The "give" setup for assignment 1 and the advanced version should now work. There are some challenges in configuring "give", especially the auto-test mechanisms. Bear with us if there are outages.
  • The "give" system should now know about ELS/ELP extensions. It should be possible to query your deadline using "give". You might need to provide a dummy file with the correct name (which the auto-test should then reject). If something seems to be wrong with the deadline you are told, please contact us via email.
  • Our script for creating gitlab repositories fails and skips students who don't seem to have accounts on the gitlab instance. If you've never logged in to it, please log in to the gitlaand check if your repository exists. We are a little surprised how many students don't seem to have done this yet.
  • We have tweaked the assignment spec a few times. For instance, if you couldn't get the sources via gitlab and fetched from the website, the kernel build might fail (because you have the Part 5 adjustments already). There are some new hints in the assignment spec how to proceed.
  • There was an issue with the secret messages for advanced part 2. If you've done that already, check the website and see if your secret message has changed.
  • We've been asked repeatedly about assig codes). The key is to match expectations. If you want to pair up with an existing contact, make sure they plan on doing roughly the same amount of advanced parts as you. Note that students in Ext-OS have constraints on this, and pairs are meant to work together on every submission. There is a process for managing uneven contributions and pair splits, but we don't want to apply that process unless we really have to.

 
Assignment 1 Updates (Posted by Thomas, Thu Jun 19)
The Assignment 1 spec is now up to version 3. This includes details of how to get the concurrency tests for Part 5 and Part A-1. We've also put up more information about the Extended-OS advanced-part rules, and some info for students concerned about these rules, see the forum post.
 
Assignment 1 Released (Posted by Thomas, Sun Jun 15)
We've now released assignment 1. The specification is now linked on the main menu. See the spec for all the details. There will be a quick overview in Monday's lecture. Ask questions on the forum.
 
King's Birthday Pre-recorded Lecture (Posted by Thomas, Mon Jun 9)
I've put up a 1-hour lecture on Echo360 that completes the discussion of concurrency and synchronisation mechanisms that we began in Week 1. Catch you on Wednesday for the implementation details of threads and system calls.
 
More on Moodle (Posted by Thomas, Sun Jun 8)
For reasons out of our control, the moodle site has "COMP3891" in its name, but not "3231" or "9201" or "9283". I've put a link on the menu bar that may help in finding it.
 
First Extended Lecture (Posted by Thomas, Thu Jun 5)
The first Extended OS lecture is coming up soon! The slides are now up on the website. We're still working on the moodle/Echo360 issues related to the extended components. For now, the extended component will be recorded and the recording made available this afternoon (possibly via a workaround link on the forum again). It's more fun to cover the extended content interactively. Please attend the lecture if you can, we don't plan to try to support hybrid-mode interactive participation in the extended lectures.
 
Week 1 Wednesday Lecture (Posted by Thomas, Tue Jun 3)
We believe the moodle issue is now solved, and Echo360 recordings should now be available to everyone. This may allow live streaming. I will also post a zoom link in the forum again today.
 
Week 1 Monday Recording (Posted by Thomas, Tue Jun 3)
We are aware of an issue in getting access to moodle and Echo360. We understand that faculty admins are looking into it. For now, a backup recording has been posted in a temporary place, linked in a couple of places on the forum.
 
Week 1 Monday Lectures Slides Up (Posted by Thomas, Sun Jun 1)
The lecture slides for both halves of tomorrow's lecture are now up. Also, congratulations to the students who already got started on the warmup assignment, found an issue, and reported it in the forum. That should be fixed now.
 
Discourse Forum (Posted by Thomas, Mon May 26)
This year we'll be using Discourse rather than Ed for our forum. Information about getting connected to the Discourse forum is now on this website. You should be able to reach the forum by just clicking the link on the menu (under "Support"). Apologies if you see old references to Ed/Edstem forums (or even older websites) anywhere. If there are issues connecting to the forum, let us know.
 
Welcome to OS in 2025! (Posted by Thomas, Wed Apr 2)
The course website will take shape soon. For now, it is mostly empty, with various assignment-related resources copied over from last year.