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logo img  50.005 CSE

Operating System

This section contains the syllabus and materials for the first part of 50.005. You can find Weekly learning objectives below, and an even more comprehensive objectives in each of the notes.

Textbook

Silberschatz, Galvin, Gagne. Operating Systems Concepts with Java, 8th Ed. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-50949-4. (required) - Abbreviated as “SGG” in this document

Week 1: SGG Ch. 1.1 - 1.6, 1.8.3, 1.13.3

  • Define what an operating system is
  • Describe basic roles of an operating system
  • Know the difference between User vs Kernel mode, and how to switch between each mode using system calls and interrupt
  • Describe computer system organisation (basic architecture)
  • Describe how I/O interrupts occur and how the Kernel handles the interrupt
  • Describe and explain the basic structure of storage / memory device hierarchy and derive computations for cache performance
  • Explain the meaning of timesharing, context switch, scheduling, and multiprogramming - all of which is part of OS process management
  • Explain the basic difference between process and program

Week 2: SGG Ch. 2.1 - 2.6, 2.7.1 - 2.7.3, 2.9.2

  • Explain a variety of OS services and their applications
  • Describe ways on how to access OS services
  • Explain the difference between making direct system calls vs through API
  • Describe the possible ways to pass parameters using system calls
  • Describe and explain different types of system calls and their purposes
  • Explain the difference between user programs and system programs
  • Describe and explain different types of system programs and their purposes
  • Explain the basic principles behind OS design: simple, layered, microkernel using examples: macOS, JX, MSDos, and UNIX.

Week 3: SGG Ch. 3.1-3.3, 3.4.1, 3.6.1, 4.1-4.2, 4.3.1, 4.4, 4.5.1 - 4.5.2

  • Explain the concept of processes, and the difference between codes, programs and processes
  • Explain the difference between concurrency and parallelism
  • Describe and explain various process lifecycle, scheduling states and their transitions
  • Know the process management terms: process control block, and context switch.
  • Describe different types of process queues and I/O queues
  • Know how to create a new process, e.g: using fork() in C or ProcessBuilder in Java
  • Explain how interprocess communication (IPC) works
  • Explain the concept of threads and its difference with process
  • Describe two types of threads: user and kernels and their models and their applications
  • Compute amount of speedup in multicore programming

Week 4: SGG Ch. 6.1-6.4, 6.5.1, 6.5.2, 6.6.1, 6.8.1 - 6.8.2, 6.8.4

  • Explain issues of multiprogramming and concurrency: the race condition
  • Describe and explain the concept of critical section
  • Discuss how Peterson’s solution solve the critical section problem and prove its correctness
  • Explain how synchronisation hardware works in general
  • Describe and explain the concepts of mutex and condition synchronization
  • Explain other critical section solutions that do not require busy waiting: semaphores
  • Explain how semaphores can be used as a mutex and condition synchronization
  • Explain how Java implements synchronization using synchronized methods and named condition variables

Week 5: SGG Ch. 7.1-7.4, 7.5.1, 7.5.3, 7.6.2, 7.7

  • Explain the problem of deadlock
  • Describe necessary conditions for deadlock
  • Draw and explain resource allocation graphs
  • Discuss ways to handle deadlocks through prevention, detection, and recovery
  • Describe and explain deadlock avoidance algorithm: Banker’s algorithm
  • Describe and explain deadlock detection algorithm
  • Explain the difference between deadlock avoidance algorithm and deadlock detection algorithm

Week 6: SGG Ch.10.1, 10.2, 10.3.2 - 10.3.7, 10.6, 11.2.1

  • Explain what is a file system and the file system namespace
  • Explain file format, permission, and type and how they are used in the file system
  • Describe and explain possible operations on file
  • Describe the concepts and the difference between file data and metadata (Attributes)
  • Learn the concepts of file descriptors and file system data structure, i.e: how the OS stores files in the memory
  • Explain UNIX file system data structures and mapping between table entries
  • Describe the concepts of various directory structures and how directory works: e.g tree structures (acyclic and cyclic)
  • Discuss the difference between symbolic and hard links and its purpose