Tutorial slides for COMP2017: System Programming

If you have any questions, please email me at stvya.sharma@sydney.edu.au or post it on EdStem.

Important: For any discrepancy, please refer to the content in the Lecture Slides and the Tutorial Exercises. These slides are only to be used to help explain concepts. They may leave out small details that are examinable, or they may contain information that is not examinable. Always use the Lecture Content and Tutorial Exercises as the primary reference.

Week Topic Description

Week 2 Tut A Introduction to C History of C, differences from Java, and fundamental language characteristics

Week 2 Tut B Arrays & Pointers C arrays, pointer arithmetic, and introduction to Linux and the shell

Week 3 Tut A Number Systems & Memory Binary and hex, data representation, endianness, IEEE 754 floating point

Week 3 Tut B Strings & Preprocessing C string manipulation functions, compiler usage, and preprocessing directives

Week 4 Tut A Standard Library & Bitfields String functions, math.h, and bitwise operations with bitfields

Week 4 Tut B Structs & Unions Declaration, initialization, memory layout, padding, and nested structures

Week 5 Tut A File I/O Unix file philosophy, file descriptors, and standard C file I/O functions

Week 5 Tut B Dynamic Memory Stack vs heap, malloc/calloc/realloc/free, and building linked lists

Week 6 Tut A Linked Lists & Generics Singly/doubly/circular linked lists, dynamic arrays, and void* generic lists

Week 6 Tut B System Calls & Signals File descriptors, syscalls, blocking vs non-blocking I/O, and POSIX signals

Week 7 Tut A Function Pointers Declaration syntax, callbacks, typedefs, dispatch tables, and qsort

Week 7 Tut B Compilation Pipeline Stages of C compilation: preprocessing, lexing, parsing, assembly, and linking

Week 8 Tut B Unix/Linux Processes and Memory Processes, threads, fork/exec/wait, popen, race conditions

Week 9 Tut A Fork Review & Safe Forking Review of fork/exec/wait/popen, race conditions, safe/unsafe fork patterns, and mmap for memory-mapped files

Week 9 Tut B Advanced IPC Pipes, FIFOs, shared memory, message queues, and semaphores for Inter-Process Communication

Week 10 Tut A Asynchronous I/O Interrupt-based vs epoll-based async I/O, epoll_create/ctl/wait, edge-triggered vs level-triggered

Week 10 Tut B POSIX Threads Thread vs process, pthread_create/join/exit, race conditions, thread-specific data

Week 11 Tut A Critical Sections & Mutexes Critical sections, race conditions, mutex locking/unlocking, initialization, types, and common pitfalls

Week 11 Tut B Deadlocks & Starvation Deadlock definition, wait-for graphs, lock ordering, prevention strategies, dining philosophers, starvation vs deadlock

Week 12 Tut A Synchronisation using Semaphores and Conditional Variables Semaphore API, condition variables, bounded buffer producer-consumer, semaphore vs mutex comparison, Amdahl's Law

Week 12 Tut B Recursion in C Base cases, recursive cases, the call stack, tail recursion, and common recursive algorithms

Questions for practice Questions that are being used in my slides.

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