Revised June 4, 2014

CS 350: Operating Systems

General description

This course introduces operating systems, what they do, how they are used, and how they are implemented.

Logistics

Audience

• 3A or 3B CS major students

Normally available

• Fall, Winter, and Spring

Related courses

• Pre-requisites: CS 240, 241, 246, (CS 251 or ECE 222)
• Successors: CS 343 and many of the 4th year CS major courses
• Anti-requisites: ECE 254, MTE 241, SE 350

For official details, see the UW calendar.

Software/hardware used

• C programming language

Typical reference(s)

• Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Arpaci-Dusseau Books, 2014

Required preparation

At the start of the course, students should be able to

• Use sequential programming skills
• Understand computer organization
• Write, test, and debug programs of a moderate size

Learning objectives

At the end of the course, students should be able to

• Extend complex programs written by others
• Choose appropriate data structures and algorithms to solve a variety of programming problems
• Select and use suitable editors and development environments (to some extent) and use the tools provided as part of the programming process
• Test if a program runs properly and correct faults by debugging
• Explain the main components of modern operating systems and construct simple implementations of those components
• Produce prose of a technical nature
• Demonstrate awareness of fundamental trade-offs in algorithm design, including time versus space
• Create correct concurrent programs of moderate complexity
• Explain the concepts of threads and processes and address spaces
• Describe memory management (as related to operating systems) and virtual memory
• Discuss issues related to processor scheduling
• Explain how file systems work and how they interact with disk drives
• Describe how operating systems work and how applications interact with devices
• Explain how processes can communicate within the same machine

Typical syllabus

Operating system introduction (2 hours)

• Roles of an operating system
• Three views of an operating system (application, system, and implementation)
• Operating system interaction with devices

Multi-programming (7 hours)

• Processes and threads, system calls, context switching
• Managing processor time
• Types of scheduling, scheduling algorithms

Concurrency (6 hours)

• Principles of concurrency
• Mutual exclusion and semaphores
• Deadlock detection and prevention

Memory management (8 hours)

• Virtual addressing and address translation
• Principal of locality, spatial locality, and temporal locality
• Virtual memory management: segmentation, paging, caching strategies
• Load control, swapping, and thrashing

Device management (3 hours)

• Physical structure and properties of devices
• Device control and interaction, blocking, buffering, disk scheduling, DMA

File systems (5 hours)

• File naming, types, and logical organization
• Space allocation and management
• File system interfaces
• Implementation strategies

Interprocess communication (5 hours)

• Terminology and issues
• Message passing functionality, pipes, sockets, signals, shared memory, and other communication mechanisms