Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Ethan Blanton

This information is advisory only. The authoritative course description and requirements for a given semester are defined in the course syllabus.

Overview

CSE 410/510 courses may be on various topics, and may not be repeated frequently. Each offering listed below will have a different description and focus.

My past materials have been taken down as they do not comply with current Federal accessibility standards, and no exception is provided for historical material.

Offerings

Spring 2025 Fall 2018

This Offering: Fall 2018

Lecture
BLA (20736):MWF09:00–09:50,Norton 214(Ethan Blanton)
LabN/A
Office HoursN/A
SA Office HoursN/A

Lectures

Due to US government regulation regarding accessibility requirements, and based on guidance from University at Buffalo administration, past lectures from this course have been removed.

Description

This course is a special topics preview of the upcoming CSE 220 Systems Programming course. It will cover low-level systems programming in userspace at the userspace/kernel boundary. Students will learn about the C programming language, system calls, memory management, threads, processes, and concurrency.

Prerequisites

Students are expected to have a solid grasp of simple data structures (such as lists and arrays) and some programming experience. (CSE 250 or equivalent experience.)

Text

The text for this course is Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, Third Edition, by Randal Bryant and David O'Hallaron.

I recommend the book The C Programming Lanuage, Second Edition, by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. This is not a required text for the course, but it is the sort of text that you will put on your shelf and consult for the rest of your career.

Policies

The ultimate authority for course policies is the course syllabus. However, my general academic integrity policy can be found here and my list of policies is here

Topics

The topics to be covered in this course include:

  • The C programming language
  • Compiler and linker invocation and their roles in program development
  • Version control, build, and other systems
  • Representation of in-memory data structures
  • Memory management
  • Process creation and management
  • Threads
  • Synchronization primitives and concurrency
  • The kernel/userspace boundary and the system call interface

Course Structure

The primary deliverables for this course are weekly labs and several larger projects. Labs will consist of short exercises intended to deepen student understanding of course material (and perhaps cover background material for course projects), and will be evaluated in-lab by teaching assistants. Course projects will be C language implementations of concepts discussed in class. Projects and labs will make up at least 50% of the final course grade, with the remainder being quizzes, and exams.

There are no graded homeworks for this course. Written homework assignments may be given to help students understand the material, and any material covered in homeworks may appear on exams or quizzes, but such assignments will not be directly evaluated.

Programming Assignments

All projects for this course must be implemented in C and compile and run correctly on the course-provided virtual machine image. Students will be expected to use version control and appropriate build tools (such as make) to manage their projects.