ITS8020

ITS8020 Systems Programming

Course Card
Lecturer: Jaagup Irve <jaagup.irve@ttu.ee>

Previous year: 2018. Historical materials can be found at Real-Time Operating Systems and Systems Programming.

Elevator pitch

The course is an advanced C course which delves into the intricacies of hardware, memory management and operating system design. It looks at basic operating system components (scheduling, mutexes) and also at GNU/Linux standard library. You will be expected to program difficult tasks and it will be englightening. The course has been enjoyed by numerous smart students over the years.

Grading

Grading is based on points earned during the course.

90+ points earns a grade of 5, and 50+ lets you pass. Exam can earn you up to 60 points and is difficult. Programming independently (lab) is worth 40 points max. There are 10 bonus points for attending and working on the labs. It is possible to agree on a different course project during the course.

Lectures

Note: Anything up to the lecture may change

1. Introduction (course overview, grades, operator precedence, real time overview) PDF
2. Stack Exploration, Long Jump PDF
3. Heap PDF
4. Hardware, interrupts, basic IO: Please watch the videos PDF
5. Signals, System Calls PDF
6. Threads PDF
7. Scheduling, Processes PDF
8. File IO, file and directory management PDF
9. Programming an Operating System PDF
10. Optimization PDF
11. Networking PDF and Bit-Fields PDF
12. Compilation and Utilities PDF
13. Security PDF
14. Localization PDF
15. Real Time Operating Systems PDF
16. Summary PDF

Practice

• Basic command line and compilation
• Stack Exploration
• Exploring Debugger
• Signals
• Threads
• Processes
• File Attributes
• Writing and Reading Binary Data
• Network Sockets
• Optimization

Homework

The homework for the course is a file encoder/decoder using a Huffman algorithm. The deadline for the task is set, but if you show your progress weekly, it can be extended without penalty depending on the amount of progress shown. The encoder needs to be shown and defended before the lectures conclude (that is: within 2019).

• Huffman Encoder

Links

• Toyota killer firmware
• Use of Assertions
• How to C in 2016 - or why the lecturer should be deprecated
• Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit Redone - a take on a classic
• Raspberry Pi Os - an opsystem from scratch