School of Computer Science & Engineering
University of New South Wales
Advanced Operating Systems
COMP9242 2002/S2
Final Exam
General Rules
- This is a 24h take-home exam.
- The exam runs from 17:00 on Wednesday, 13 November 2002 to 17:00
on Thursday, 14 November 2002
- The basic exam question is available now, but the papers you
are asked to analyse will be made available only at 17:00 on
Wednesday, 13 November 2002.
- The papers will be available in hardcopy from my office and
electronically via this WWW page.
- The total exam is worth 35 marks.
- You will lose 3.5 marks for each hour, or part thereof, your
submission is late.
- You are not to get any help from anyone on the exam. You should
not talk to anyone else about the exam from the time you receive
the full details until you submit your solution.
- You have the choice of three different ways to submit your
solution:
- Submit a hardcopy by the deadline (17:00 on Tuesday, 21
November 2000). It must be accompanied by the signed certification of sole authorship. It
must be submitted to me in person, or some person (Karen
Corrigan or Simon Winwood) I have
specifically authorised to receive the exams if I am not
there. In
addition, you must submit an electronic version within three
days of the end of the exam.
- Submit an electronic copy, via the give system, by the
deadline, and submit a hardcopy, including the signed certification of sole authorship,
within three days of the end of the exam.
- Submit, by the deadline, a digitally signed electronic
copy. This must contain your full name, student number,
date, and the following declaration:
I hereby declare that this submission is my own work, and I have
not received any help whatsoever.
The file must be signed with PGP, be ASCII, and have an
extension .pdf.asc or .ps.asc. This is
achieved (when using PGP 5.0 or later) with the command:
pgps -a <file>
Notes on electronic submissions
- 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.
- The submission must either be in PDF format (and use the extension
.pdf) or in PostScript format (extension .ps).
- The submission must be made via the give system, mark name "exam".
- 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:
- 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!
- 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).
- See me, with your key signed by Simon, and proof of identity. I
will then sign your key.
- 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.
- 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:
- What problem is it trying to address?
- How well does it address the issue?
- How does it relate to other work? Does
it reference relevant other work (as far as you can tell), does it
do the other work justice?
- How technically sound is it? Does their argumentation, the
presented data convince you? Should they have been looking at other
issues?
- How good are the results?
- How good/deep is their analysis?
- How easy would it be to reproduce their results?
- How general are their results? Can they be applied to other
systems? Did we learn some general truth?
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.