Operating Systems

• 39 hrs lectures
• 13 hrs projects

• 60 pts final exam (written part)
• 10 pts mid-term test (4 pts written part, 6 pts test part)
• 30 pts projects

Students are acquainted with the basic principles of operating systems (with emphasis on the UNIX operating system) and they understand the influence of operating systems upon the operation of complex computing systems. Students are able to exploit scripts for solving various tasks in a UNIX-based environment.

The goal is to acquaint students with the principles of operating systems in general and with the basic concepts of the UNIX operating system.

The course should mainly inform students about the main concepts and mechanisms of operating systems (files and file systems, processes and scheduling, inter-process communication, memory allocation) so that the students are able to efficiently use services of operating systems in their future work. The courses further acquaint students with shell scripting allowing them to automate many tasks commonly done during development, administration, or another usage of computing systems. Finally, students will get their first experience with creating concurrent programs.

• Introduction to Software Engineering (IUS)
• Introduction to Programming Systems (IZP)

A basic knowledge of programming in C.

1. Introduction. Evolution of computers and operating systems (OS). Requirements on OS, classification of OS, standards. The basic terminology and the general structure of OS.
2. The UNIX operating system. The history and the most important development branches. The basic principles and structure of UNIX. The structure of the UNIX kernel, its interface and the different forms of communication with the kernel.
3. UNIX shell. Basic commands, programs, scripts. Special symbols. Input/output redirection, pipes, background processes, sub-shell. Variables, control structures.
4. A basic introduction to programming in UNIX. Languages, compilers, principles of linking programs, dynamically linked libraries. Principles of the X-Window graphical user interface.
5. Standard utilities of UNIX.
6. File systems. The physical and logical structure of disks. Types of files, i-nodes, storing files on a disk.
7. Access rights to files in UNIX, users and groups, the suid and sgid attributes, the typical structure of directories in a UNIX system.
8. Input and output. The corresponding kernel services. Data structures and algorithms used by the input/output subsystem of the kernel.
9. Management of processes. Loading the system, the init process. Fork, exec, exit, and wait calls. States of processes, scheduling.
10. Memory management. Address spaces, address translation, memory pages.
11. Virtual memory.
12. Mutual exclusion, semaphores and other synchronization means.
13. Typical synchronization tasks, deadlocks, starvation.

1. Creating scripts by means of UNIX shell and the standard utilities of UNIX.
2. Process synchronization in UNIX using the C language.

• Evaluation of the two home assignments individually solved by the students (max 30 points).
• Evaluation of a mid-term exam (max 10 points).

Exam prerequisites:
The minimal total score of 10 points gained out of the home assignments and the mid-term exam.

• Solving two individual home assignments, a combined final exam.
• The minimal number of points which must be obtained from the final exam is 27. Otherwise, no points will be assigned to a student.

The minimal total score of 10 points gained out of the home assignments and the mid-term exam.