Operating Systems - Walden University NCSC 6101 Spring 2007

I'm taking this course in the January of 2007 through a distance learning, masters in computer science program at Walden University. — Doug Daniels (Dev Journal) 2006/11/23 19:31

This course is concerned with the principles and practice of modern Operating Systems (OS). We will study core operating system principles: kernel design, processes and threads, concurrency and synchronization, deadlock, resource management, memory management and virtual memory, I/O and file systems, distributed file systems, protection and security. We will examine the design and implementation of different Operating System features across a wide-variety of systems including UNIX – Linux, Solaris, Windows, and a teaching Operating System called Nachos. We will learn about the inner workings of the Operating System as well as the exposed systems programming interface. Several programming projects will be used to gain hands-on experience with real Operating Systems issues.

The course objectives are:

• Demystify the inner workings of Operating Systems
• To gain a firm grounding in the conceptual issues surrounding good OS design
• To understand the different roles played by the Operating System
• To understand the tradeoffs involved in the design and implementation of Operating Systems
• To understand OS abstractions from the “outside” through systems programming interfaces

Listed below are the various topics that were covered in the course. (I'm going to try and provide some additional details such as homework assignments and practical code samples for some of them. — Doug Daniels 2006/12/20 22:00

1. Overview
2. Concurrency
3. Processes
4. Memory management
5. I/O and file systems
6. Protection
7. Security
8. Distributed systems
9. Linux
10. OS Design
11. Wrapup