electiveHQ

The course is a general introduction to operating systems, with an emphasis on practical techniques and fundamental principles underlying modern general-purpose operating systems. The course is based around RISC-V computer system running XV6 operating system. References to actual systems are also made at different points in order to illustrate concepts and/or implementation issues. The course starts with a brief review of the history of operating systems, and a discussion of their main design issues. This is followed by an introduction to RISC-V assembly language programming and compilation process. The important concepts, such as interrupt, executable file, and process, which encompasses the execution context of programs, are introduced. Afterwards, we study concepts of system call, driver, file system, process scheduling, and memory management. After introducing the concept of threads, we are lead to the subject of how processes and threads communicate, cooperate and synchronise, and to the topics of race conditions and deadlock.