CS420 Syllabus

The course will cover chapters 1 - 10 of the text (Silberschatz, Galvin, & Gagne Operating System Concepts).  Part 1 of the text is essentially an introduction and overview that we'll cover very quickly.  Parts 2 and 3 cover process and memory management, respectively —the two most interesting and significant of the three essential functions of  all operating systems (and the third, I/O management, is not as conceptually strange as the first two; you can figure it out on your own, in other words).  We'll be spending our time on fundamental concepts, the problems that operating systems must solve and the various techniques that have been developed to solve them.

High level goals and objectives:

• Understand the major, sometimes conflicting, purposes of modern operating systems and the issues and compromises that must be dealt with to satisfy them.
• Understand the major components, features, services, and in some cases algorithms required in modern operating systems
• Be able to use vendor documentation to learn how to request OS services from within application programs written in C

Specific topics to be covered:

•  Process management
  • Processes, PCBs, context switching, and the process state diagram
  • Interprocess communications
  • Threads and lightweight processes
  • Scheduling
    • Short term
    • Mid-term (and it's relationship to memory management)
    • Long-term
  • Process synchronization (race conditions, critical sections, mutex locks, and Dykstra semaphores)
• Memory managment
• Binding
• Contiguous memory management schemes and issues
  • MFT
  • MVT
    • External and internal fragmentation
    • Compaction and its costs
• Noncontiguous memory management
  • Paged memory management
    • The page table
    • Internal fragmentation
    • Multilevel paging and translation look aside buffers
  • Segmented memory management and segment tables
  • Segmented and paged memory management
  • Demand paging, thrashing, and the mid-term scheduler
• I/O management (topics as time permits)

Programming: There will be several small programming assignments in which you make system service calls to the operating system to get a feel for how some of the theoretical concepts of this class work in practice. Both Microsoft Windows and UNIX theoretically provide a POSIX API for you to access their services; but since I personally have done very little work with any of the Microsoft operating systems, I can't vouch for their compliance and won't be able to help you if you run into trouble. Accordingly, I recommend (not require, merely strongly recommend) that you use our campus UNIX environment for the programming for this course. Very little sophistication in UNIX or its user interface (shell) will be required; the web page I pointed you to, above, should really give you access to all you'll need; if you need help, come see me — I get paid to help you (and usually enjoy it, come to that). The campus UNIX operating system is provided by Sun Microsystems, who provides a thorough set of online documentation that will be the source of the information needed to complete (and enjoy, I hope) the programming assignments. Please read the integrity policy for this course; you will be held to it whether you've read it or not.

Required texts:    Silberschatz, Galvin, & Gagne Operating System Concepts; either the 7th edition or 8th edition, although the 8th is preferred

Other Reading and Reference Materials:   Online at  http://ultra.pr.erau.edu/~jaffem/classes/cs420/cs420_standard_web_pages/cs420_references.htm

Prerequisites: CS225 or equivalent C programming skills

Grading: There will be 2 midterms at 15% each and a final at 30%, all three exams closed notes, closed book. The remaining 40% will be equally apportioned among the 4 or 5 programming assignments.

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This page last changed 25 July 2009 by M.S. Jaffe