Course Surveys 2019

Gernot's Comments on myExperience Course Survey

Free-form comments

Nice to see all the positive feedback!

I'm only going to address the comments under “what could be improved?”

The project begins before we can get a good understanding of seL4 mechanism.

There is an inherent challenge here: To make the project fit we have to get you started as quickly as possible. We do our best by covering in the first week's lectures all you need to get to use the kernel, and adding more insight on why these things work this way later. And there is plenty of support from tutors. This seems to work well with most students, and I don't really see how we could improve here, but am open to suggestions.
I think we were lucky to get lectures scheduled on Mon and Tue. If they were later in the week, that would have made things more difficult...

Lecture contents could have more material related to the project. More tutors to answer question.

We cover as much as needed for the project, and provide plenty of help beyond. It is core to this course that hand-holding is minimised and students learn to ask the right questions of tutors (and docs). If there are specific suggestions on what else should be covered (without watering the project down) then I'm open to this.
Re tutor availability: We had a consult every day and were monitoring consult utilisation, shifting tutors to maximise availability. Interestingly the utilisation patterns change every year, so it's impossible to get this right beforehand. We do what we can, but it seems in general the consults worked well.

I can't think of any reason for doing System call interface before actually implemented virtual memory management. Basically we need to rewrite most of the I/O syscalls when doing virtual memory management. And some parts of the spec are out of date/incorrect...

Hm, I don't see why the VM implementation should affect the syscall API. The whole idea is to think about the right abstractions before implementing.
Having said that, we'll re-consider this approach next time round.
Re spec out-of-date: Apologies for this. Things were revamped in a big way, and there's always a risk of some doc updates being inconsistent or forgotten. I hope you pointed them out to us. We'll keep working on fixing things that come up.

A queue system for marking in the consult, could write the group numbers on the whiteboard so the tutors can determine if there is anyone else for them to mark.

Thank you for this suggestion, we'll consider it next time.

I think the project was spot on, impressive given this was the first trimester run. The lectures were a bit full on, but I'm not sure what can be done about that, other than warning students about it.

Thanks for this. The course is meant to be challenging ;-) I did restructure a fair bit to adapt to the new schedule, shortening some parts, expanding others. It seems to have worked for most lectures.

Thanks for the feedback, and your participation in the course!

Gernot