2. Course Description

Course Objectives:

Upon completion of this course, you should be familiar with the basic issues involved in the design of operating systems. In particular, you should be familiar with:

• The historical evolution of operating sytems from bare machines to today's multiprogrammed, multiprocessor, and network systems.
• The function and structure of the major components of an operating system.
• The process concept as a fundamental abstraction.
• Issues arising from concurrency and various options available for dealing with these issues, including techniques for concurrent programming.
• Issues and options available for scheduling the CPU and other system resources.
• Issues and options available for managing physical memory, including the use of virtual memory.
• Issues arising from the need for protection of users from one another and various options for dealing with these issues.
• Current issues in operating system design, such as distributed systems and networking.
• The major design features of some typical operating systems (MS/DOS, VMS, Unix).

In addition, through the course projects you will receive practical experience working with the C programming language on a Unix system.

Course Techniques and Procedures:

This is a survey course, in which we will attempt to gain a general familiarity with a large volume of material. For this reason, textbook reading and problem sets will play a larger-than-usual role in the course, with a proportionately reduced emphasis on actual programming. Actually implementing even a very small operating system would be far beyond the scope of an introductory course like this; however, several programming projects will provide an opportunity for you to gain some familiarity with key aspects of concurrent programming and operating system implementation.