Instructor

Textbook: Textbook: Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, Fourth Edition by William Stallings.

Course prerequisites: CSC 116 (Intro to Computing), and MA 121 (Calculus).

Course purpose: This class prepares you to understand fundamental issues in operating systems. You will be introduced to multi-threading, synchronization, scheduling, virtual memory, security, communication/networking and distributed systems. The material will be covered in terms of operating systems services exported by the operating systems interface. Current trends will be discussed to give a better understanding of future developments likely to be included in operating systems.

Course objectives: By the end of the course, you should be able to do the following things:

• Processes and Threads.To reiterate states and transitions of processes/threads; to explain non-local transfers of control; to determine context switching details; to analyze process/thread performance; to design and implement utilities querying process/thread states.
• Synchronization. To list different synchronization models; to explain to operational characteristics of these models; to use these facilities in concurrent programming models; to contrast these models; to utilize synchronization for contemporary architectures; to select a suitable synchronization paradigm for a given problem.
• Virtual Memory. To reiterate the principles of hardware and software support for virtual memory; to express operational properties of address translation; to perform the calculations of address translation; to predict the impact on TLB misses; to apply virtual address in runtime systems; to judge the merits and shortcomings of virtual memory usage.
• Scheduling. To recite different scheduling paradigms; to paraphrase qualitative and quantitative properties of these paradigms; to derive a schedule for given parameters; to model quantitative properties of scheduling paradigms; to exploit existing scheduling models support by systems; to contrast different scheduling approaches.
• I/O and File Management. To reiterate the principles of file systems in terms of data structures; to understand access control; to interface with directory services on the system API level; to judge the merits and shortcomings of contemporary file systems.
• Protection and Security. To list different protection mechanisms; to explain security measures in operating systems; to recite common security attacks to systems and detail their exploitation of security holes; to contrast these attacks; to demonstrate by example how a selected exploit functions; to select suitable counter-measurements for exploits.
• Communication and Networking. To reiterate basic communication paradigms and networking protocols in terms of their functionality;to explain differences and functionalities of communication modes and layers; to analyze networking performance; to design and implement communicating client-server applications.
• Distributed Systems. To characterize the impact of distributed systems on operating systems and runtime support; to explain operational characteristics of distributed protocols and services; to algorithmically solve a problem within a distributed environment; to analyze the performance of your solution; to design and implement selective operating system and runtime services for distributed computing.