Syllabus

Assessment Objectives

1. Grasp the basic concepts, principles, and functions of an operating system, and understand how the system runs as a whole.
2. Grasp the strategies, algorithms, mechanisms, and interrelationships of operating system process, memory, file, and I/O management.
3. Be able to apply the principles, methods, and techniques learned here to analyse and solve problems, and to describe the relevant algorithms in C.

1. Operating System Fundamentals

• (a) Concepts, characteristics, functions, and services of an operating system
• (b) Development and classification of operating systems
• (c) The runtime environment of an operating system
  1. Kernel mode and user mode
  2. Interrupts and exceptions
  3. System calls
• (d) Operating system architectures

2. Process Management

• (a) Processes and threads
  1. The concept of a process
  2. Process states and transitions
  3. Process control
  4. Process organisation
  5. Process communication: shared memory systems; message passing systems; pipes
  6. The concept of a thread and multithreading models
• (b) Processor scheduling
  1. Basic scheduling concepts
  2. Scheduling moments, switches, and the scheduling procedure
  3. Basic scheduling criteria
  4. Scheduling approaches
  5. Typical scheduling algorithms: first-come first-served; shortest job (or shortest process/thread) first; round-robin; priority scheduling; highest response ratio next; multilevel feedback queue.
• (c) Synchronization and mutual exclusion
  1. Basic concepts of process synchronization
  2. Basic approaches to mutual exclusion in critical sections: software methods; hardware methods
  3. Semaphores
  4. Monitors
  5. Classical synchronization problems: producer–consumer; readers–writers; dining philosophers.
• (d) Deadlock
  1. The concept of deadlock
  2. Deadlock handling strategies
  3. Deadlock prevention
  4. Deadlock avoidance: the safe state of the system and the Banker’s algorithm
  5. Deadlock detection and recovery

3. Memory Management

• (a) Memory management fundamentals
  1. Concepts: program loading and linking; logical versus physical address spaces; memory protection
  2. Contiguous allocation management
  3. Non-contiguous allocation management: paging; segmentation; segmented paging
• (b) Virtual memory management
  1. Core concepts of virtual memory
  2. Demand paging
  3. Page replacement algorithms: OPT; FIFO; LRU; CLOCK
  4. Page allocation strategies
  5. The working set
  6. Thrashing

4. File Management

• (a) File system fundamentals
  1. The concept of a file
  2. Logical file structure: sequential files; indexed files; indexed sequential files
  3. Directory structure: file control blocks and inodes; single-level and two-level directory structures; tree-structured directories; graph-structured directories
  4. File sharing
  5. File protection: access types; access control
• (b) File system implementation
  1. File system layering
  2. Directory implementation
  3. File implementation
• (c) Disk organisation and management
  1. Disk structure
  2. Disk scheduling algorithms
  3. Disk space management

5. Input/Output (I/O) Management

• (a) I/O management overview
  1. I/O control methods
  2. The I/O software layering
• (b) The I/O core subsystem
  1. The concept of I/O scheduling
  2. Caching and buffering
  3. Device allocation and reclamation
  4. Spooling