Operating Systems

Content

This course provides an introduction into operating systems and their relation to the architecture of computers. In the practicals you will implement mechanisms and techniques in an operating system framework (SWEB).

After having attended the module “Operating Systems”, students have a basic understanding in classic operating system principles. They understand the basic tasks of an OS as well as possible approaches to their implementation. Furthermore they understand the necessary cooperation of the OS-Software and the underlying hardware to achieve an efficient implementation and are able to do so in the practical parts of the lecture. There they also acquire skills in synchronizing parallel processes.

Topics of the course include

• History
• Hardware – which services provides a processor to the OS
• Processes and Threads
• Deadlocks
• Memory Management
• Input/Output
• File Systems
• Multiple Processor Systems
• Security

An important aspect of this course is to provide hands-on-experience to students. This is why several exercises are part of this course. In these exercises, example software and countermeasures are implemented and then attacked and evaluated.

Material

All the material for the course can be found here.

Administrative Information

This course is a combined lecture with practicals (VU). There are two oral exams (one for each exercise) as well as a written exam for the lecture.

Prerequisites

• Advanced knowledge of C/C++

These prerequisites are best fulfilled by taking the following courses beforehand:

• Introduction to Structured Programming
• Software Development Practical Exercises
• System-Level Programming

Lecturers