Operating System Functions

Operating System Functions

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

No. of lectures: 8

Prerequisite course: Operating Systems or Operating System Foundations

This course is a prerequisite for Distributed Systems (Part II and Diploma).

Aims

This course hopes to impart a detailed understanding of the algorithms and techniques used within operating systems. It aims to consolidate the knowledge learned in earlier courses, and to encourage students to develop an appreciation for the trade-offs involved in designing and implementing an operating system.

Lectures

• Introduction and Review: OS functions & structures. Virtual processors (processes and threads).

• CPU Scheduling. Multiprocessor operating systems and scheduling. RT scheduling (RM, EDF). Multimedia scheduling.

• Memory Management. Virtual addresses and translation schemes. Demand paging. Page replacement. Frame allocation. VM case studies. Other VM techniques.

• Storage Systems. Disks & disk scheduling. Caching, buffering. Filing systems. Case studies (FAT, FFS, NTFS, LFS).

• Protection. Subjects and objects. Authentication schemes. Capability systems.

• Extensibility. Motivation. Low-level, OS-level and user-level techniques (and examples).

Objectives

At the end of the course students should be able to

• write a simple program which implements any simple disk scheduling algorithm

• define the ``working set'' of a process

• sketch the design of a log-structured file system

• describe the advantages/disadvantages of the various page-replacement strategies

• understand the differences between ACLs and capabilities

• describe three techniques for supporting extensibility

Recommended books

Bacon, J. (1997). Concurrent Systems. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).
Silberschatz, A., Peterson, J.L. & Galvin, P.C. (1998). Operating Systems Concepts. Addison-Wesley (5th ed.).
Tanenbaum, A.S. (1992). Modern Operating Systems. Prentice-Hall.
Leffler, S. (1989). The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix Operating System. Addison-Wesley.
Solomon, D. (1998). Inside Windows NT. Microsoft Press (2nd ed.).
Singal, M. & Shivaratri, N. (1994). Advanced Concepts in Operating Systems: Distributed, Database, and Multiprocessor Operating Systems. McGraw-Hill.

Useful Links

• On-line Information for Operating Systems Concepts
• Guide to the linux kernel

The notes and the past exam questions are available on-line.

You can also find a selection of useful papers here.