Welcome to the Operating System Fundamentals course, COSC-3221 for Winter term 2003. Materials, instructions, and notices for the course will accumulate here over the semester.

The purpose of this course is to introduce the fundamental concepts of operating systems, including aspects of concurrency, process, threads, CPU scheduling, process synchronization, deadlock, storage management and file systems. The course covers both theoretical and practical issues underlying the design and implementation of operating systems. An excellent knowledge of the C/C++ programming language and familiarity with UNIX are essential. At the end of this course, a student will be able to understand and apply the fundamental concepts required for the use and design of operating systems. For a bit more about this course, click here!

The objective of this course is to provide the students with the concepts necessary to enable them to:

• understand conceptually what operating systems are, what they do, and how they are designed and constructed.
• demonstrate, in a hands-on approach, an ability to implement selected features of operating system code in either C or C++.
• define the basic operations system components that support the machine-independent abstractions on particular target architectures.
• understand how the entire system fits together, not merely how one or two important parts interact.
• understand the means by which fundamental problems in operating systems can be analyzed.

Particular emphasis will be given to process management (processes, threads, CPU scheduling, synchronization, and deadlock), (virtual) memory management (segmentation, paging, swapping, caching), file system implementation, interprocess communication and more advanced topics as time allows.