| 1. | Chance to play with L4
Really good lecturer
Interesting material |
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| 2. | Building a real operating system, in a real operating system development with so little debugging tools, and eventually watching it run successfully. |
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| 3. | Able to build a simple operating system almost from scratch. |
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| 4. | Just the hands-on experience provided rather than just
theory.
The weighting given the assignment emphasised this |
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| 5. | I can get my hands really dirty, and gain real understanding of OS. |
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| 6. | The whole project was cool
The lectures were great fun and full of cool content
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| 7. | Definitely the project. |
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| 8. | OS implementation, good critical view of OS research, lecturer knows what he is talking about. |
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| 9. | Project |
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| 10. | The level of freedom allowed for the project. Unlike most other computing subjects, the project allowed us (the guinea pigs) to laregely make our own decisions and either reap the benefits, or the face the consequences. |
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| 11. | Challenging |
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| 12. | L4 & Mungi lectures ... they were really inspiring.
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| 13. | The chance to build a simple OS from scratch is a good idea, I had heaps of fun doing the project.
The small lecture style was cool too, I love the fact that I can pop questions at you when things just pop into my head (You probably can guess who I am now). |
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| 14. | The project |
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| 1. | Lab machines dodgy |
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| 2. | The assignments were quite hard, and allocated to little time to complete. Balnacing the subject with my thesis was indeed challenging. |
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| 3. | Have to spend all my time building the simple operating system. |
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| 4. | lack of reliable machines in asyst,
l4 bugs - not necessarily a bad thing in itself but just the time wasted due to them |
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| 5. | The documentation on L4 is not enough, and the last milestone of the project is much harder than normal, so it's too hard to finish the last milestone on time. |
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| 6. | The dodgey network setup and the broken asyst machines got to be real pain. |
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| 7. | Massaging some of the machines into working and generally fighting over the machines that worked well became tedious. |
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| 8. | Not enough support for people that don't have a strong OS background or a high level of intelligence to strengthen themselves. |
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| 9. | Wednesday 6-9 |
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| 10. | It would have been beneficial if relevant lecture material been presented before certain mile stones.
The in depth look at the ipc mechanisms in lecture 10 (I think) was good, however I think it would have been worth while spending some time looking at how other things work in l4. |
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| 11. | The hardware and having to come in to do assignments. I really wanted the luxury of doing things at home and run X at home didn't really cut it because of the poor speed and that some machines corrupted their timers somehow during the running of SOS that can only be relieved by a cold boot.
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| 12. | It's too short! I think this course could be better if it was a year-long course, but I guess that's what an OS thesis is for. |
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| 1. | I don't think I was 'missing' any background knowledge. At this level, we should be expected to be able to find any extra knowledge we need!
I also think that the credit/co-req is suitable for these reasons. |
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| 2. | The mentioned prerequisites are definitely required, and also a strong working mind and interest in OS is defintely needed to fulfil the requirements of all the milestones. I think maybe even a high CR in OS should be the prerequisite, and a CR is suffice for Comp Arch.
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| 3. | Yeap, I think that is sufficient. Cos unless we have enough background on L4, we still have to go through the painful process of learning and playing around with it. |
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| 4. | suitable, although having done computer arch previously would probably help
(I wasn'd doing them concurrently) |
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| 5. | I think some knowlege on computer architecture may help. |
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| 6. | I think the computer architecture was useless in AOS. AOS covered any topics needed in much greater depth and to better understanding. AOS helped more for comp arch than the other way around.
OS is a definate pre-req, however. |
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| 7. | I believe a credit in COMP3231/9201 is a suitable preparation. |
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| 8. | I don't think either of those courses provide a suitable preparation for the subject as nothing is taught on multithreading and concurrency in early years. C programming is an important strength also which isn't assured in every student at the moment. |
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| 9. | It might have been better to make computer architecture a pre-requisite rather than a co-requisite. |
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| 10. | Suitable mostly, but for people who haven't touched OS for a whole year, things do get rusty.
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| 11. | The prereqs for this course is sufficient I think. I think I need more general background about things such as how programs how compiled and how to program in C. But that's mainly me not knowing too much low-level stuff. |
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| 1. | All of it - a general grounding of knowledge in how the darn thing that manages your apps works is a good thing.
More specifically, I think that the low-level C hacking is the part I'm going to make most general use of!
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| 2. | The knowledge of the requirements of an operating system. |
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| 3. | The appreciatio of a good operating system. |
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| 4. | hmm... hard to tell at the moment :)
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| 5. | the project really helps. |
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| 6. | All if it.
This subject opens your eyes to how wide a field OSs is and that it is not just a windows/linux fight. |
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| 7. | Caching, TLB and pagetables. |
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| 8. | That depends on whether I am capable of performing research in the area. If I don't, probably only the low-level coding experience. |
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| 9. | File systems, caching and TLB'S |
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| 10. | Microkernels - possibly. I'm not terribly sure. I'm not sure if a career in OS is for me either. |
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| 11. | I think Multiprocessor and Real-time issue. The other stuff are cool if you planning to be a OS hacker, but I'm not :), So I guess I shouldn't be in this course?
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| 12. | Hardware (cache,tlb,PT's etc) and Real-time
Some Mungi topics applicable to MMU-less hardware |
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| 1. | None. One point I would like to make, though, is that students could be actively encouraged to take part in an ongoing research project, rather than reconstitute an existing SOS...
I would suggest that ALL projects should be 'special' in this sense. |
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| 2. | Nothing really. |
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| 3. | benchmarking |
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| 4. | monolic kernel architecture like linux would help to compare from miroc-kernel architecture. |
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| 5. | Just a bit more on older systems that influenced modern ideas, I think... only if it's an interesting topic... AFAIK it could be very boring :) |
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| 6. | Not sure. |
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| 7. | It would have been nice to see more about current research around the world. It would have definitely sparked some interested research nerves inside me. |
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| 8. | More current research |
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| 9. | Never did mention much about exokernels. Only read a little about them and I was interested in whether you think that sort of philosophy is any good. |
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| 10. | We see alot of how OS and hardware interact, but we never seem to touch on how user/apps programmer and OS interact? Like obviously a Good OS has to satisfy the application programmer (besides being fast). |
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| 1. | Heh - less source code browsing :)
Seriously, I recognise the importance of this but it's BORING! This is really nit-picking, though. The enjoyment + learning that I derived from this course far exceeds just about every other course I've done at this university. It's really nice to see that somebody (read: Gernot) is willing to put in the time and effort to avoid AOS following the general trend I've seen in subjects (easier assignments, less catering for advanced students, lower workloads, less material covered -> less overall usefulness). Thanks for a brilliant subject! |
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| 2. | It really good. |
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| 3. | can't think of anything really |
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| 4. | L4 implementation should also include more on structure not just coding. |
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| 5. | I don't know... no matter how tired I was after work I always enjoyed the AOS lecture (this is very contrasting to the 6-9 lecture on thursday we have for algorithms where I spent most of the time in the bar instead) |
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| 6. | Definetely required dancing clowns (sorry this survey is too long to maintain seriousness :) ... I can't think of anything though. |
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| 7. | Also the time meant that it was _very_ difficult to miss by sleeping in :) |
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| 8. | Not much really, Besides the source code part of the lecture, it is a bit dry. It's probably made all the more dry since the source code is pretty hard to read on screen. (I printed Inside L4 out, which helps).
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| 1. | I think EVERYBODY should do an alternative project.
That way, we get to have fun comparing projects, and the school gets more useful research done.
Alternatively, make the project one HUGE group project encompassing the whole class, and we can try & build a halfway decent system! |
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| 2. | Nope |
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| 3. | nope |
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| 4. | That really depends on what the alternatives are. |
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| 5. | I was interested in the idea but I didn't really know where to start thinking about another project or to find a list. |
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| 6. | Must be difficult to maintain fairness in marking. |
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| 7. | Great idea .... but too scary and the marking scheme well, I had no idea really. |
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| 8. | Not really, I don't know much about them, but it's a good idea to let the smart people do something cool |
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| 9. | It would have been interesting to do one.... |
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| 1. | Just re-capping. This subject was brilliant. That isn't to say that there mightn't be improvements, but this subject is so far above 'average' that it isn't funny. PLEASE don't decrease the difficulty of this subject to 'cater for the masses', because I think it would lose a hell of a lot. |
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| 2. | Keep up the good work.... |
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| 3. | In question 7 when I rated it as 'Much Heavier' that is not too say it is bad! Yes there is more work, but everybit of it is worthwhile.
In Q8 I rate it as 'amongst the best' because there is no flat out 'the best' option. |
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| 4. | None. |
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| 5. | The lecturer can at times be intimidating. Eliminating that and providing a little more support for the weaker students would generate a more positive feel for those with a lesser knowledge of operating systems. |
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| 6. | Many times I really wanted to concentrate on the implementation of a particular component and do it _well_. The milestones don't allow that if time is an issue.
Doing an unrelated thesis and AOS at the same time may not have been such a good idea.
What does it take to join the Mungi team? Of the whole class how many would you welcome to join this team? etc. etc.
Some ideas about career prospects in this field would be really nice.
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| 7. | I think the weekly milestone, if you're late you're penalised is silly. I like the milestone idea, but it is very inflexible. Like sometimes you try to work ahead, but other times the other subjects swaps you and you tend to fall behind. Sometime you just fall behind a week and already you lost a mark.
Maybe have the same amount of milestone, but extend the deadline?
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| 8. | L4/Alpha and gdb for debugging :) |
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