Operating Systems

Lecturer: Mr S.M. Hand (smh22@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 12

This course is a prerequisite for Concurrent Systems (Part IB), Further Java (Part IB), Introduction to Security (Part IB) and Security (Part II).

Last year's course is described below. Details of this year's course will be available nearer the time.

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.

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.

I-O management.

Creating virtual device abstractions. Process-device synchronisation. Top-down I-O invocation at the system call interface.

Process management.

Creating virtual processor abstractions. Support for processes and threads. Scheduling.

Memory management.

Memory protection and sharing. Virtual memory. Integrated and separated I/O.

File management.

Filing systems, interface and implementation. File and directory structure. Access control. Physical space management. Backup and archiving.

Overview and case studies.

Overview of OS structure and dynamic invocation Microkernel versus closed OS structure. Single address space versus protected address spaces.

Recommended books:

Dowsing, R.D. & Woodhams, F.W.D. (1990). Computers from Logic to Architecture. London: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Bacon, J. (1993). Concurrent Systems. Addison-Wesley.

Tanenbaum, A.S. (1992). Modern Operating Systems. Prentice-Hall.

Silberschatz, A., Peterson, J.L. & Galvin, P.C. (1991). Operating Systems Concepts. Addison-Wesley (4th ed.).

Custer, H. (1993). Inside Windows NT. Microsoft Press.

Heuring, V.P. & Jordan, H.F. (1997). Computer Systems Design and Architecture. Addison-Wesley.