Operating System Foundations

Lecturer: Dr J.M. Bacon (jmb@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 16

This course is a prerequisite for Distributed Systems, Further Java, Operating System Functions, Introduction to Security and Computer Design.

Aims

The aims of this course are

• to introduce the basic principles of computer systems organisation and operation

• to show how hardware is controlled by program at the hardware/software interface

• to introduce the modular design of systems software and the principles of its dynamic execution

• to show how resources are abstracted and managed by operating system software

• to explore the principles of concurrency control

Lectures

• Computer design; the hardware and its interfaces. Bus/memory/CPU organisation. Representation of numbers and characters; instruction sets and addressing. Operation of a simple computer; the fetch-execute cycle. [3 lectures]

• Requirements. Requirements for support of concurrency in systems. Overview of OS functions, structure and dynamic invocation; modules, processes and protocols. Microkernel versus closed OS structure. [1 lecture]

• Device management. I/O devices and interfaces; polling and interrupts. The general exception mechanism for interrupts, errors, system calls, memory management. Character and DMA interfaces. [1 lecture]

• I/O management. Process-device synchronisation. Creating virtual device abstractions; top-down I/O invocation at the system call interface. Process (top-down) - process (bottom-up) synchronisation via I/O buffers. Synchronous and asynchronous I/O. [1 lecture]

• OS process management. Creating virtual processor abstractions. Support for processes and threads in operating systems and in language systems. Scheduling. [2 lectures]

• Interprocess communication (IPC). System structure; synchronisation primitives; concurrency control without hardware support. Semaphores and their implementation; examples. Shared memory mechanisms. No-shared-memory mechanisms; distributed IPC. [4 lectures]

• Dynamic resource allocation. Deadlock detection and recovery. [1 lecture]

• Case studies. Aspects of UNIX and Windows NT will be used throughout as examples and consolidated here. [3 lectures]

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

• be prepared for hardware and architecture courses

• understand the interaction of software and hardware

• understand how systems are executed dynamically and understand the concepts of process, thread and address space

• understand the need for and implementation of concurrency control

• understand the design of widely used operating systems at a high level of abstraction

Recommended books

Dowsing, R.D. & Woodhams, F.W.D. (1990). Computers from Logic to Architecture. London: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Bacon, J. (1997). Concurrent Systems. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).
Tanenbaum, A.S. (1992). Modern Operating Systems. Prentice-Hall.
Silberschatz, A. & Galvin, P.B. (1998). Operating System Concepts. Addison-Wesley (5th ed.).
Bach, M.J. (1986). Design of the Unix Operating System. Prentice-Hall.
Leffler, S.J. et al. (1988). The Design of the 4.3BSD Unix Operating System. Addison-Wesley.
Custer, H. (1993). Inside Windows NT. Microsoft Press.
Soloman D A (1998). Inside Windows NT. Microsoft Press. (2nd ed.)
Pham, T.Q. & Garg, P.K. (1996). Multithreaded Programming with Windows NT. Prentice-Hall.