Operating System

What you’ll study

Introduction: an operating-system overview, computer-system structure, the structure and components of an operating system. System calls: classes of system calls and their description. Processes and threads: the process and thread model, process and thread creation and termination, user- and kernel-level threads, scheduling and scheduling algorithms, the dispatcher, context switch, real-time scheduling. Concurrency and synchronization: IPC and inter-thread communication, critical regions, the critical-section problem and its solutions. Resource management: deadlock — the ostrich algorithm, detection and recovery, avoidance, prevention, and starvation. File management: file naming and structure, file access and attributes, file organization and directories, file-system implementation, allocation strategies, the UNIX i-node, block management and quota. Memory management: fixed and dynamic partitioning, virtual memory, segmentation, paging and swapping, the MMU. Virtual memory management: page tables, page replacement, the TLB, demand paging, thrashing and performance. Disk I/O management: disk structure and performance, low-level formatting, disk-arm scheduling, error handling and stable storage.