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November 29, 2025: Information regarding the final exam (December 2025)
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General rules: The rules are the same as the ones of the midterms:
- Documents: forbidden except 1 handwritten sheet of paper (A4 format)
- Electronic/communication devices forbidden (including smartphones, calculators, smartwatches)
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Instructions for part 1 (R. Lachaize):
- The exam may cover all the topics studied in all the lectures (slides + mandatory book chapters + blackboard discussions).
- However, some topics will only be partially covered:
- In all the lectures, you can skip the slides with an orange/yellow “[Advanced]” or “[Optional]” mark in the title
- Lecture 0 (Unix I/O): You can skip the details. However, you must know what a Unix pipe is and how it works.
- Lecture 4 (Threads): You can skip the part about “advanced details” (slides 27-31)
- Lecture 7 (Paging to disk): you must precisely understand the principles of the mechanisms (~until slide 9 + book chapter 21). The exam will not include advanced questions about swapping policies. However, you must be able to explain/illustrate what is an eviction/replacement policy (especially the main idea of the LRU policy) and the mechanisms that can be leveraged to guide such policies (“Accessed” bit and “Dirty” bit).
- Lecture 8 (Additional details about virtual memory):
- You can skip the part about “early VM system calls” (slide 7)
- Regarding “hardware/OS paging extensions”: you must study/understand the parts about x86-64. You must also understand the motivation/benefits and drawbacks of using page sizes that are larger than 4 kB (or a mix of 4-kB and larger pages). You must also understand the modifications/extensions of the paging mechanism that are necessary to support large page sizes. However, you can skip the following parts: x86 PSE, x86-PAE, 64-bit address spaces (hashed and inverted page tables).
- You can skip the part on “exposing page faults to applications”.
- Lecture 9 (Processes - Part 1): you must understand what fork and exec do an how they work internally (mainly slides 36-39). You can skip the rest.
- Lecture 10 (Processes - Part 2): You can skip this lecture.
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Instructions for part 2 (T. Ropars):
- The exam may cover all the topics studied in the lectures but Lecture 13 (Advanced synchronization topics) can be ignored.
- In Lecture 12 (Thread Synchronization: Implementation), The advanced discussion the implementation of sleeping locks using Futex can be ignored (from slide 39).
- In Lecture 16 (File systems), anything else than the basic file system implementation can be ignored (from slide 32).
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September 30, 2025: Note that the schedule of for week 41 (October 6-10) will differ from the usual one. The lab session will be held on Tuesday afternoon (October 7) and the lecture slot will take place on Thursday morning (October 9). ADE has already been updated with the modified rooms.
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September 27, 2025: The two midterm exams will be held on the following dates (during the first part of the lecture slot at 13:30):
- Midterm 1: Tuesday October 14, 2025
- Midterm 2: Tuesday November 4, 2025
- The precise duration of each exam (typically 60 or 90 minutes) will be confirmed later.
- Please check ADE for the rooms.
- Reminder of the guidelines: All documents will be forbidden (except 1 dual-side, handwritten sheet of paper in A4 format). All electronic devices will be forbidden.
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August 19, 2025: The web site is up. Make sure to check it regularly for updates.