Operating Systems

This course gives an introduction to the design and implementation of Operating Systems, the software that manages hardware and software resources on modern computing machinery.

Topics discussed in class include:

• function and structure of Operating Systems, system calls, interrupts, and exceptions, dual-mode execution, kernel architecture, device drivers

• processes, running multiple processes, and the various algorithms for CPU scheduling and their properties

• threads, inter-process communication, programming for concurrent execution and the danger of race conditions

• process synchronization, critical sections, mutual exclusion, and mechanisms for these, deadlocks and solutions

• mechanisms for multicore, parallel and distributed systems

• memory management techniques, virtual memory, paging and page table management

• protection and security, access control, security policies and mechanisms, side-channel attacks

• IO and storage, programming with IO, hard disk drives, disk scheduling, SSDs, RAID

• file systems, block allocation, directory structures, file systems in practice;

• virtualization, emulation, virtual machines.

Concepts and principles discussed in in this course are generally valid for any operating system, specific implementations like Linux or Windows are used as illustrations.