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School of Computer Science & Engineering
University of New South Wales
 Advanced Operating Systems 
  COMP9242 2002/S2 

Final Exam

General Rules

Notes on electronic submissions

  1. In the cases where a paper submission is also required (cases 1 and 2 above), the electronic submission, when printed on a CSE printer, must appear exactly as the submitted hardcopy.
  2. The submission must either be in PDF format (and use the extension .pdf) or in PostScript format (extension .ps).
  3. The submission must be made via the give system, mark name "exam".
  4. If using PDF, make sure that you only use Type-1 fonts, as others are unprintable on some printers. LaTeX users can ensure the use of Type-1 fonts by producing a PostScript file with the command
    dvips -Pwww -o file.ps file
    and then converting this to PDF.

Notes on digitally signed submissions

Digitally signing your submission only makes sense if I can verify your signature. I therefore require you to have your signature signed by me and Simon beforehand, or within three days of the end of the exam. Therefore, if you want to use the digital signature option, do the following:
  1. Familiarise yourself with PGP (or GPG). We will not provide tutorials on this, it's up to you. Get yourself a public key if you don't have one. Follow the recommended safeguards to keep it secure. It will be like your normal signature!
  2. See Simon to have him sign your key. This requires that you supply appropriate proof of identity (student card, if the picture isn't clear enough we may require further identity proof).
  3. See me, with your key signed by Simon, and proof of identity. I will then sign your key.
  4. This doubly-signed key can then be used to sign your exam. (Feel free to get others to sign your key as well.) If you get your key signed after the exam, make sure that it is the same key as used for signing the exam.
  5. Make sure that PGP or GPG is installed on the system you are going to use to write your exam, and that you can use it reliably. If you stuff up, it's your own problem.

Specifics

You are given two research papers (the links will be active from 17:00 on the 13th):

You are to read, understand, and critically assess the papers. Questions you may want to ask yourself for each of the papers:

These are only hints, I am not asking you to explicitly answer all these for each paper. However, you may find those questions helpful in critically analysing the papers. Imagine you are a reviewer for a conference to which the papers have been submitted, and you are to judge their contribution to the field.

Note that all papers are in fact published (and therefore cannot be all that bad :-)

What to submit

You are to submit a report which summarises for each paper the basic ideas behind their work. You are to give a critique of the technical merits, achievements and shortcomings (if any). The papers are not directly related, so you don't have to compare them.

I am intentionally not specifying a length limit. However, I strongly encourage you to be concise. Lengthy submissions will almost certainly be unfocussed and waffly. I cannot imagine a decent job in excess of 3000 words, and would imagine that a very good submission would stay well below 2000 words total. If your report gets longer than this you should step back and try to focus.

What I will be looking for

You will be marked on the level of understanding and critical analysis portrayed in you submission. All relative to what can be reasonably expected from you (I know that none of you have a PhD in OS yet :-)

Sample solution

Here is a (very good) solution of one of the students in the class (hence it was done in "real-time").

Previous exams

You may find it useful to look at the 1999 and 2000 exams, and the sample reports provided there.
Last modified: 29 Oct 2004. [an error occurred while processing this directive]