Operating Systems

Operating Systems

2025-2026 2^nd Semester
1^st Year Romanian/English

TL;DR

Practical tests/exams every three/four weeks
Strict grading policy
Insufficient attendance -> No grade (i.e. ABSENT)
Less than 5 for certain grades -> Re-examination

Online Communication

Login to Microsoft Teams using your university account
Join the Operating Systems 2025/2026 team using code biwoe06
For announcements watch all the following
- University email @stud.ubbcluj.ro
- Microsoft Teams General channel

Instructors

Lecture:	Conf. Dr. Rareș Boian
Seminar/Lab:	Lect. Dr. Alina Călin Lect. Dr. Horea Greblă Lect. Dr. Bogdan Mursa Lect. Dr. Horea Mureșan	Drd. Daniel Boța Drd. Alexandru Kiraly Drd. Ciprian Stupinean Drd. Tudor Jinga	C.d.a. Cristian Brad C.d.a. Alexandru Cornea C.d.a. Tudor Lechințan C.d.a. Cristian Leonte

Syllabus: RO, EN

Graded Work

	Practical tests/exams	Written exam
Duration	30-40 min	60 min
Requirements	Implement solution on the exam server	20 free-answer questions
Reference	Anything available in the exam account	A4, double-sided, handwritten cheat-sheet

Grading policy for practical tests/exams

0 = The student cannot answer questions about the code, or the solution solves a different problem
1 = Shell scripts have syntax errors or C code has compilation errors/warnings
4 = Runtime crash
7 = All of the above are OK but the implementation is not quite complete
10 = Complete implementation and correct execution.

Final grade calculation

In order to get a final grade, the attendance requirements below must be met. Attendance can be accumulated only during the regular semester activities:

	First year students	Repeating students
Required seminar attendances	Minimum 5	Minimum 4
Required lab attendances	Minimum 12	Minimum 10

Grade calculation formula (check the tooltips to understand the acronyms):

Grade =
SaSeminar attendances
<
SaReqRequired seminar attendances
||
LaLab attendances
<
LaReqRequired lab attendances
? ABSENT
: floor(0.5 + 1 + 0.05*
TcUNIX C programming test grade
+ 0.05*
TprUNIX processes test grade
+
0.3*max(
EwWritten exam grade
,
RwWritten re-exam grade
) + 0.2*max(
EshUNIX Shell practical exam grade
,
RshUNIX Shell practical re-exam grade
) + 0.3*max(
EptUNIX processes and threads practical exam grade
,
RptUNIX processes and threads practical re-exam grade
))

Must be ≥ 5 Must be ≥ 5 Must be ≥ 5

Weekly Schedule

Week	Lecture	Seminar	Laboratory
Week	Lecture	Seminar	Practice	Test	Practical-Exam
1: Feb 23	Environment setup. UNIX command line introduction. C programming in the UNIX command line.	UNIX command line introduction. Regular expressions. Basics of grep, sed, awk.Presented only in the seminar	Environment setup. UNIX command line introduction. C programming in the UNIX command line.
2: Mar 2	UNIX Shell programming		C programming in the UNIX command line. Detecting memory problems with valgrind.
3: Mar 9	UNIX Shell programming. Windows command line.	UNIX Shell programming	Basics of grep, sed, awk, find, sort, uniq, cut, cat, etc	C programming in the UNIX command line (Tc)
4: Mar 16	UNIX file I/O. UNIX file system structure. UNIX Processes: fork, wait, exit	UNIX Shell programming	Basics of grep, sed, awk, find, sort, uniq, cut, cat, etc. UNIX Shell programming
5: Mar 23	UNIX Processes: exec. UNIX Signals. UNIX inter-process communication: pipe	UNIX Processes: fork, wait, exit, exec, signal, kill	UNIX Shell programming
6: Mar 30	UNIX inter-process communication: FIFO, dup, dup2, popen	UNIX Processes: fork, wait, exit, exec, signal, kill	UNIX Processes: fork, wait, exit, exec, signal, kill		UNIX Shell Programming (Esh)
7: Apr 6 (Fri)	UNIX IPC: shared memory. POSIX threads, mutexes	UNIX pipe, FIFO, popen
-: Apr 13	Vacation	Vacation	Vacation	Vacation	Vacation
8: Apr 20	POSIX RW Locks, conditional variables, semaphores, barriers		UNIX inter-process communication: pipe, FIFO
9: April 27 (Fri)	Thread programming examples with synchronization and deadlock prevention	POSIX threads, mutexes, conditional variables, RW locks	POSIX Threads, mutexes, RW locks
10: May 4	OS architecture and processes	POSIX threads, mutexes, conditional variables, RW locks	POSIX conditional variables, barriers	UNIX Processes (Tpr)
11: May 11	Memory management	POSIX semaphores, barriers, inter-process semaphore (sem_init) with shared memoryPresented only in the seminar	POSIX threads, mutexes, conditional variables, RW locks, barriers
12: May 18	Memory management, physical I/O, devices and drivers		Recapitulation and practical exam preparation
13: May 25	Bootstrap. Linux kernel programming.	File systems and concepts: NTFS, ZFS, journaling, copy-on-writePresented only in the seminar	Recapitulation and practical exam preparation		UNIX Processes and Threads (Ept)
14: Jun 1 (Mon)	Windows kernel. Mobile operating systems.				UNIX Processes and Threads (Ept)

Re-examination Info

Re-exam options
- Rw - Written re-exam. This has the same format as the written exams that you took in the normal examination period.
- Rsh - UNIX Shell practical re-exam.
- Rtp - UNIX Processes and threads practical re-exam.
Who should/can take which re-exams:
- If you have insufficient attendances, you cannot take any of these re-exams. You need to take the class again next year.
- If you have sufficient attendances, but no final grade, it means that some of your grades were too low or missing, so you must take those respective re-exams, and any others that you choose (you can take multiple exams on the same day).
- If you have a final grade and want to improve it, you can take any of the exams you choose (you can take multiple exams on the same day).

Grade Statistics

Resources

Environment setup
- Windows Subsystem Linux: Alma Linux OS 9, WSL2 Installation Instructions
- VirtualBox
Reference materials
- Teaching notes
- Books:
  - Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Arpaci-Dusseau Books, November 2023 (Version 1.10)
  - The Linux Command Line - A Complete Introduction, William Shotts, 7th Internet Edition
Tutorials
- C programming
  - C Made Easy
  - C Tutorial by Brian W. Kernighan. Use this tutorial for a more detailed presentation of the C programming languge.
  - Learn-C.org
  - C Arrays and Pointers as Function Arguments
- UNIX Editors: vi, emacs, nano, joe
- Sed: (1), (2)
- Awk: (1), (2)
- Shell Programming: (1), (2)
Screencast by our colleague Lect. Dr. Radu Dragoș (narrated in Romanian)
- Linux commands
- Grep
- Sed
- Awk
- Shell programming
Practice problems