General:
- - Lots of groups only tried combining the 3 group members' parts
- only in the last few hours. Emphasize that this is a bad choice.
- Encourage them to use CVS/sourceforge/etc.
-
- - Upgrade gdb, 6.2.1 is better.
-
- - Encourage students to turn off -O3.
-
- Suggest where to start in each assignment?
- Provide more tests!
- - Turn off optimization in provided makefiles?
-
Threads project:
- Many students thought this was by far the hardest. What can we do
to make it a little easier?
+
+ Move `join' part to project 2?
- - Students don't understand that they'll need to read lots of code.
-
- - Students don't read the debugging page. Point out in multiple
- places, and especially point to the backtrace description.
+ - Students don't understand that they'll need to read lots of code
+ before they can start writing.
- Students think data structures are more important than they really
are. Say that clever data structures won't get you too much extra
- credit compared to simpler ones. Bad data structures might cost
- points though.
+ credit compared to simpler ones. Really bad or "stupid" data
+ structures might cost points though.
- Some students would appreciate more discussion of nitty-gritty
details:
Userprog project:
- Students thought project 2 was especially easy. Reduce amount of
- time to allow more time for another project?
+ time to allow more time for another project? Add something to do
+ with the page table? Move `join' functionality here from project
+ 1?
VM project:
(or a location on disk). A sentence or two clearing up this
ambiguity would have been helpful.
-
Filesys project:
- A fair number of students thought this was the hardest project.
Perhaps we could add some notes about where to start?
-
-
-Another student note:
-
- 3) This is probably an "unsupported" configuration, however I'll point
- it out anyway. Running user programs under Pintos compiled on my
- desktop I get the following warning:
-
- unknown ELF segment type 65041580
-
- If you look at /usr/include/elf.h you will find:
-
- #define PT_LOOS 0x60000000 /* Start of OS-specific */
-
- It would appear that elf segments starting with this program header
- are "OS-specific" My Occam's Razor explanation here is that the
- segment holds the bits to configure the stack protection features in
- newer GCCs.
-
- gcc version is: gcc version 3.3.4 20040623 (Gentoo Linux 3.3.4-r1,
- ssp-3.3.2-2, pie-8.7.6)
-
-This probably means that we should provide a linker script that leaves
-out weird stuff.