Various updates and clarifications.

Students should receive an email by 3pm today today (Thu the 21st) (this originally read 2pm) telling them which room they have been allocated to.

Students can bring in some paper notes, on regular A4 paper. It can be printed or hand-written, and it can be double sided. Maximum 20 sheets (using both sides, that means 40 page surfaces). If more than 1 sheet, they must be stapled together to avoid pages being dropped.

The course staff have tested the Inspera/SEB setup themselves. Still to do: try again to get the lecture notes available in the SEB environment. An update on that will follow soon.

You should bring a charging mechanism for your device. Some power boards will be available in each exam room, but not all students will be able to use them. You should fully charge your device before the exam.

A note on the technology. If you are unable to complete the exam for technology reasons outside of your control, the university will offer a supplementary exam. Please make an effort to prepare so that the technology works, but don't stress about the consequences of a technology failure, they will be a nuisance rather than a disaster. This applies to students who have two exams on Wednesday, they should attempt all the exams as scheduled, and if some problem makes that impossible, they will be offered a supplementary exam.

We have a few final notices to put up. Some good news and some bad news.

Marking for the subjective part (Part 3) of assignment 2 is still going slowly. We're now over three quarters of the way through, and hope to get it finished and released to you really soon now.

As mentioned in the final lecture, the main exam is on Wednesday the 27th, 9:45AM - 12:00 midday. We're sorry we couldn't get an earlier date. Most students will be in the Patricia O'Shane lecture theatres 103, 104 and 105 or the Ainsworth G02 lecture theatre. A smaller number of students with ELPs will be in smaller rooms elsewhere, and a smaller number again will be given alternative exam times. Those students will be contacted about the details soon, and everyone will know what room they are in prior to the Wednesday.

We have some sample exams and sample exam questions from past versions of the course available on the wiki. See the menu bar on the left. This includes two complete sample exams (quite old) and an indicative list of questions related to the various course content. The structure of the upcoming exam resembles the sample exams but adapted to a web-based exam format. It has a number of multiple-choice or true/false questions, some short-answer questions, and some questions that ask you to work through some process (e.g. a page-table lookup) or do a calculation and show the steps of your working.

Our chosen exam platform is Inspera, with the Safe Exam Browser. Students are to bring their own device for the exam, and have the safe exam browser installed. Many of you will be familiar with the process. There is information about how to install and test the software linked from here: SEB software info . Note that link includes a general test "sample exam" you can use to make sure the software is functioning. If you will not be able to run the software on your own device, get in contact with us by email.

You will need to bring an exam device into the exam and your phone to perform multi-factor authentication (MFA). You will then need to turn off your phone. You may also bring in a UNSW approved calculator, and additional paper notes up to 20 pages. We're sorry you can't bring the textbook or any other book into the exam, or a giant pile of printed notes. We will attempt to make the lecture notes available as part of the SEB browser environment. Apologies, we haven't got that working yet, and will have to confirm that in a subsequent update.

Best of luck with the exam preparation.

Tomorrow is the final lecture. The majority of the time will be given over to a review of the material we've covered so far. If you have questions about anything we've seen already, or would like us to focus on a part you feel you understand less well, mention this on the lecture forum post.

Tomorrow is also the final help session. If you're interested in turning up, react, so I know if we need to recruit an additional tutor to be there.

The submission system for assignment 3 is now on-line. Students with extensions should be able to see them via "give". If something seems to be wrong with it, let us know on the forum.

Assignment 2 submissions are coming in, with a few extensions remaining. Good work everyone!

The assignment 3 spec is pre-released, see the menu bar. There is also an "assignment 3 intro" mini-lecture, which we've covered most of on Wednesday. You can look at the spec, think through your approach, and go looking for the address space interface in your existing OS/161 checkouts.

The starting codebase you should work from will be released to gitlab on Friday.

Assignment 1 marks are out. Marks for the advanced component are still being finalised. There has been some discussion about this already; see the forum note on the auto-marking approach to assignment 1.

We're now close to the deadline for assignment 2. I see on the forum that people are working away and bug-hunting, good luck with it.

There have been quite a few questions about the assignment 2 "part 3" document. I've added even more FAQ entries to the spec. If you're really not sure how to approach it, or pick a bit of the git diff, have a look there.

The T2 provisional exam schedule has been posted. We have provisionally been given the morning slot of Wednesday the 27th, the second-last day of the exam period. This may be updated. I am going to request an earlier time. The exam will be organised using CSE facilities, which is why the UNSW central information is vague. More updates on that to come.

Assignment 1 marks will be released soon, and some commentary will be added on Monday. The auto-mark spread was good, and the vast majority of students will get their auto-mark score. Reminder: make sure what you submit passes the simple test done by "give". Don't ignore that error message if you see it, it can mean you miss out on a lot of marks.

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.

Good luck with it!

• 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.