The following is a checklist of tasks that you will ideally complete ASAP, but early in week 1 at the latest.

• Check the course surveys and lecturer response, at least for the most recent offering, to confirm that this course is for you!
• If you have not taken COMP3891/9283 Extended Operating Systems, familiarise yourself with the contents of the lecture on Microkernels (2026T2 Week 9)
• Find a partner! While Milestone 0 is to be done individually, partnering up early is highly recommended.
• Ensure you have access to the Discourse forum.
• Start milestone 0 to set up your development environment. You will confirm the following access and dependencies simply by following the initial milestone 0 instructions.
• Confirm you have access to gitlab to checkout the source repo.
• Confirm you have an aarch64 cross-compilation toolchain that builds the code base, or choose to use the toolchain on CSE.
• If you use your own toolchain, as per the build system docs, gcc 9 ≤ version ≤ 11 is known to compile the code.
• GDB 15.1 is required for debugging (you may have to compile your own cross debugger with target aarch64-none-elf or similar)
• Confirm you have access to the Odroid C2 cluster with the odroid command.
• Optionally, set up VS Code or another editor to make source browsing more efficient.

Things to Note

No vibe coding!

A core objective of this course is to teach you to think for yourself. Using an AI tool to regurgitate other people's thoughts is contrary to this objective. We will have zero tolerance for vibe coding. If you're unable or unwilling to understand the problem thoroughly and code the solution yourself, you're in the wrong course.

Demo early!

If the demonstrator finds your solution insufficient, you'll be sent back (aka "show-stopped"). If this happens on the last lab on Friday, you're guaranteed a late penalty. If you do your demo earlier, you have a chance to try again without penalty!

Also, show up early for the lab, we use a FCFS ticketing system. If you show up 10' before the end, you may not be able to demo, and this will be your own fault.

Note that we monitor lab usage and add or cancel labs based on demand.

New exam format!

Due to AI cheating, the established exam format we used for years no longer has any integrity. Instead the exam will be invigilated, you'll have to answer questions about a research paper you'll be given 24h before.

All supplementary exams will be oral.