Operating Systems

Overview of operating systems

• Role and purpose of the operating system
• History of operating system development
• Functionality of a typical operating system
• Mechanisms to support client-server models, hand-held devices
• Design issues (efficiency, robustness, flexibility, portability, security, compatibility)
• Influences of security, networking, multimedia, windows

Operating system principles

• Structuring methods (monolithic, layered, modular, micro-kernel models)
• Abstractions, processes, and resources
• Concepts of application program interfaces (APIs)
• Application needs and the evolution of hardware/software techniques
• Device organization
• Interrupts: methods and implementations
• Concept of user/system state and protection, transition to kernel mode

Concurrency

• States and state diagrams
• Structures (ready list, process control blocks, and so forth)
• Dispatching and context switching
• The role of interrupts
• Concurrent execution: advantages and disadvantages
• The "mutual exclusion" problem and some solutions
• Deadlock: causes, conditions, prevention
• Models and mechanisms (semaphores, monitors, condition variables, rendezvous)
• Producer-consumer problems and synchronization
• Multiprocessor issues (spin-locks, reentrancy)

Scheduling and dispatch

• Preemptive and nonpreemptive scheduling
• Schedulers and policies
• Processes and threads
• Deadlines and real-time issues

Memory management

• Review of physical memory and memory management hardware
• Overlays, swapping, and partitions
• Paging and segmentation
• Placement and replacement policies
• Working sets and thrashing
• Caching

Device management

• Characteristics of serial and parallel devices
• Abstracting device differences
• Buffering strategies
• Direct memory access
• Recovery from failures

Security and protection

• Overview of system security
• Policy/mechanism separation
• Security methods and devices
• Protection, access control, and authentication
• Models of protection
• Memory protection
• Encryption
• Recovery management

File systems

• Files: data, metadata, operations, organization, buffering, sequential, nonsequential
• Directories: contents and structure
• File systems: partitioning, mount/unmount, virtual file systems
• Standard implementation techniques
• Memory-mapped files
• Special-purpose file systems
• Naming, searching, access, backups
• Examples: dos, unix, windows, other

Real-time and embedded systems

• Process and task scheduling
• Memory/disk management requirements in a real-time environment
• Failures, risks, and recovery
• Special concerns in real-time systems

Fault tolerance

• Fundamental concepts: reliable and available systems
• Spatial and temporal redundancy
• Methods used to implement fault tolerance
• Examples of reliable systems

System performance evaluation

• Why system performance needs to be evaluated
• What is to be evaluated
• Policies for caching, paging, scheduling, memory management, security, and so forth
• Evaluation models: deterministic, analytic, simulation, or implementation-specific
• How to collect evaluation data (profiling and tracing mechanisms)

Scripting

• Scripting and the role of scripting languages
• Basic system commands
• Creating scripts, parameter passing
• Executing a script
• Influences of scripting on programming