CO3020 Operating Systems

Introduction to Operating Systems The role of an OS, history of OS, OS kernel, structure of a computer system An overview of basic OS concepts High level introduction to processes and threads, concurrency and deadlocks, memory management, file system, scheduling and resource management and information protection Interrupts and exceptions Introduction to interrupts, interrupt cycle, exceptions, hardware exception handling, stack frames System calls Role of system calls, classes of system calls, system call mechanism and calling conventions Processes and threads Introduction to processes and threads, process creation and termination, process/thread states, scheduling, implementation of processes and threads, user-level threads and kernel threads, context switch Concurrency and synchronization Critical region and race conditions, mutual exclusion using busy waiting, mutual exclusion using sleep and wake up, realization of mutual exclusion using synchronization primitives such as semaphores, mutexes and monitors, formal definition of a deadlock, deadlock modeling, deadlock detection and recovery, deadlock avoidance, deadlock prevention Memory management Memory hierarchy, fixed and dynamic memory partitioning, swapping, virtual memory, introduction to paging, page tables, speeding up paging, page replacement policies, virtual memory design and implementation issues, segmentation File systems File naming, file structure, file types, file access methods, file attributes, file operations, directories, directory organization, directory properties, directory operations, file system implementation, virtual file system, file system management and optimization Input/output (I/O) management I/O devices, device controllers, memory-mapped I/O, bus architectures, interrupts, I/O software, programmed I/O, interrupt-driven I/O, direct memory access (DMA), I/O management software: interrupt handlers, device drivers, device independent I/O software