Course Objectives

• learn basic concepts and principles behind the design of operating systems
• get exposed to the problems operating systems designers face, explore the tradeoffs and solutions to these problems
• see how are these issues solved in practice in real operating systems
• be able to apply these concepts and techniques in relevant circumstances
• get some hands-on experience programming OS type problems (process creation, inter-process-communications, process synchronization, mutual exclusion, deadlock avoidance)

Content

• What Operating Systems Do
• Computer-System Organization
• Computer-System Architecture
• OS Structure
• OS Operations
• Process Management
• Memory management
• Storage and I/O Management
• Protection and Security
• Distributed Systems
• Special-Purpose Systems
• Computing Environments

Detailed List

Operating Systems overview:

• interface
• system calls
• design and implementation issues
• OS structure

Process Management

• Processes and threads
• Inter-process communication
• CPU scheduling - algorithms and criteria
• Process/thread synchronization - problems and solutions
• Deadlocks - prevention, avoidance, detection, recovery

Memory Management

• Basic main memory management
  • swapping
  • contiguous memory allocation
  • paging
  • segmentation
• Virtual memory
  • demand paging
  • copy-on-write
  • page replacement
  • allocating kernel memory

Storage Management and Input/Output

• File-System interface (files, directories, mounting file system, file sharing)
• File-System implementation
• Mass-storage structure (disk structure, scheduling, management)
• Swap space management
• I/O systems (hardware, application I/O interface, kernel I/O subsystem)