CS4375 Operating Systems Concepts

CS 4375 is a course about the systems-level software called the operating system that provides an interface between application software and the computer hardware. The operation system is responsible for sharing resources, providing common services, and protecting programs from interference from other programs. Topics covered in the course include process and thread management, processor scheduling and concurrency, interprocess communication, memory management, input/output management, file systems, and networking basics.

The syllabus can be found here.

The Teaching Assistant (TA) currently assigned to this course is Maria Lizeth Reyna Cruz. You can contact her using the following email address: mlreynacruz@miners.utep.edu.

This course's instructor is taking part in the nationwide Student Experience Project. Students are asked to provide their input for the project by participating in this survey https://neptune.perts.net/participate/portal/ from Monday September 8th to Friday September 12th. The code necessary to participate will be announced in class.

We program in class. Programs developed in class will be published here:

When we don't program in class, we read existing code for tools:

Sometimes we do exercises on paper in class:

Exercise I

There will be 3 homework assignments in this course:

Homework Assignment 1 is available here. The nanpa file required for the homework is available here. The homework assignment must be submitted by each student individually in the form of an archive containing the source code for head.c, tail.c, findlocation.c and a report (as a PDF) by email to utep-fall-2025-os-hw1@christoph-lauter.org. The email must contain the student's first and last name as well as their student ID in the email body. Do not submit executables, source code files not archived together into one email address, Microsoft Word files, links to Sharepoint nor in any other format. The assignment is due on Saturday September 20th at 2:59AM MDT.
Homework Assignment 2 is available here. The homework assignment must be submitted by each student individually in the form of an archive containing the source code for the 7 programs to be written and a report (as a PDF) by email to utep-fall-2025-os-hw2@christoph-lauter.org. The email must contain the student's first and last name as well as their student ID in the email body. Do not submit executables, source code files not archived together into one email address, Microsoft Word files, links to Sharepoint nor in any other format. The assignment is due on Sunday November 2nd at 1:59AM MST.
Homework Assignment 3 is available here. Boilerplate code is available in the form of two files utepfs.c and implementation.c. The homework assignment must be submitted by each student individually in the form of an archive containing the source code UTEPFS file system (utepfs.c and implementation.c) and a report (as a PDF) by email to utep-fall-2025-os-hw3@christoph-lauter.org. The email must contain the student's first and last name as well as their student ID in the email body. Do not submit executables, source code files not archived together into one email address, Microsoft Word files, links to Sharepoint nor in any other format. The assignment is due on Wednesday December 3rd at 6:59AM MST.

There will be two midterm exams and a final exam in this course:

The Midterm Exam I has been organized on October 16th from 1:30PM MDT to 2:50PM MDT (theoretical part) and to October 17th 7:59AM MDT (practical part). Please send in the submissions for the practical part to utep-fall-2025-os-midtermI@christoph-lauter.org.
The Midterm Exam II has been organized on November 18th from 1:30PM MST to 2:50PM MST (theoretical part) and to November 19th 1:59AM MST (practical part). Please send in the submissions for the practical part to utep-fall-2025-os-midtermII@christoph-lauter.org.
The Final Exam has been organized on December 11th from 1:00PM MST to 3:45PM MST (theoretical part) and to December 11th 11:59PM MST (practical part). Please send in the submissions for the practical part to utep-fall-2025-os-final@christoph-lauter.org.

During the semester, for each class that was taught, an attendance code has been made available to the students. As stated in the syllabus, the attendance in class counts towards the course grade. In order to get attendance credit, students must send email with their student ID and all attendance codes they have collected over the semester, to utep-fall-2025-os-attendance@christoph-lauter.org. The email must be received by Friday 12/05/2025 4:59PM MST. The student's UTEP ID and the attendance codes must be in the body of the email, as plain text, separated by spaces or newlines. No attachments must be used. The analysis of the emails will be done by a computer system, not a human.