COMP2017 Systems Programming Tutorial Notes

Semester 1, 2026 | The University of Sydney

Tutor	Hao Ren
Email	hao.ren@sydney.edu.au

Welcome! This repository contains notes and examples for my COMP2017 tutorial classes. They are intended to help you review key concepts, practise further, and revise after class.

Please note that if anything in these notes differs from the lecture slides, the lecture slides take precedence.

If you have questions about the tutorial content, please feel free to get in touch by email or ask me in tutorials.

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2026 S1 Feedback for Teachers (FFT)

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Table of Contents

Weeks	Tutorials	Ed Lessons	Contents
Week 2	Tutorial A	W1 All	Compiler C Documents C Types Simple Pointers
	Tutorial B	W2 Part 1	Intro to Linux Command Line PATH Common Linux Commands sizeof Pointer Arithmetic Basic I/O
Week 3	Tutorial A	W2 Part 2	ASCII Codes String in C Basic String Manipulations
	Tutorial B	W3 Part 1	Preprocessor Compiler Flags C String Standard Library string.h
Week 4	Tutorial A	W3 Part 2	More String Manipulations C Math Standard Library math.h Bits Bitwise Operators
	Tutorial B	W4 Part 1	Struct Union
Week 5	Tutorial A	W4 Part 2	File Operations
	Tutorial B	W5 Part 1	Stack and Heap Memory Management Functions Singly Linked List
Week 6	Tutorial A	W5 Part 2	Doubly Linked List Circular Linked List Void Pointers More Exercises about Dynamic Memory Programming
	Tutorial B	W6 Part 1	Device I/O and File Descriptors System Calls Non-blocking `STDIN` Function Pointers
Week 7	Tutorial A	W6 Part 2	Function Pointer Exercises Signals Signal Safety signal() and sigaction()
	Tutorial B	W7 All	Compilation: C Compiling Process Linkage extern and static const and restrict Advanced C Programming Exercises
Week 8	Tutorial A	N/A	Assignment P1 Code Interview
	Tutorial B	W8 Part 1	Process Race Conditions fork(), wait(), and exec*()
Week 9	Tutorial A	W8 Part 2	Safe fork() + exec*() More About sigaction() Process Exercises Advanced Signal Manipulation Exercises
	Tutorial B	W9 Part 1	Inter-Process Communication (IPC) Message Passing: Pipes and pipe() in C File Descriptor Table IPC Exercises
Week 10	Tutorial A	W9 Part 2	Asynchronous I/O: Interrupt-Based vs epoll-Based select(), poll(), and epoll() socketpair() Shared Memory Brief Intro to Semaphores (More in W12 Tutorial A) Advanced IPC Exercises
	Tutorial B	W10 Part 1	Threads Thread Exercises Threads vs Processes
Week 11	Tutorial A	W10 Part 2	Critical Sections Mutexes ThreadSanitizer
	Tutorial B	W11 Part 1	Deadlocks Read-Write Locks
Week 12	Tutorial A	W11 Part 2	Semaphores Semaphore Exercises Condition Variables
	Tutorial B	W12 All	Recursion Recursion Overhead Recursion with Multi-Threads
Week 13	Tutorial A	N/A	Assignment P2 Code Interview
	Tutorial B	Revision	Revision Roadmap Revision Notes/Cheetsheets Extra Exercises for Revision

Passway to Pass Workshop	Part 2 Slides
	Part 2 Exercises - Questions
Part 2 Exercises - Solutions

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Tutorial Schedule

Time	Monday	Wednesday	Thursday
10:00-11:00			B/02
11:00-12:00		B/47	B/03
12:00-13:00	A/14†	B/13
13:00-14:00	A/15†	B/14
14:00-15:00	A/16†
15:00-16:00	A/17
16:00-17:00	A/18	A/39
17:00-18:00	A/19	A/38

^† I taught A/14, A/15, and A/16 in Weeks 2 and 3 only.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 by Hao Ren. All rights reserved.