Course Introduction

COURSE GOAL

To educate students on the basic concepts and components of operating systems, the relevant characteristics of hardware, and the tradeoffs between conflicting objectives faced by the OS.

OBJECTIVES

As much as operating systems are an essential part of computer systems, a course on operating systems is an essential part of any computer science or computer engineering program. This course is oriented towards exposing students to the essential concepts and issues that underly operating systems and their design.

Technical

Make students understand the key concepts and mechanisms of modern operating systems:

Educational

Make students understand the reasons why operating systems are built the way they are, and what the implications and lessons are for other software systems. Specific learning objectives are:

Professional

The tutorial formats will give students practice in the presentation of solutions to an audience of peers, and will challenge them to critique peer technical presentations. Furthermore, the whole course encourages critical examination and analysis of "standard" solutions.

PREREQUISITES

General

It is assumed that the student is familiar with the general organisation of a general-purpose computer (in particular, CPU, memory, bus, registers, machine instructions, interrupts/exceptions).

Students are also assumed to be competent in the C programming language.

Course Prerequisites