Understand how operating systems share processors, coordinate concurrent work, manage memory and protect resources.
Revisit processes, threads and the operating system’s role before exploring scheduling, concurrency and memory.
Explore the first lecture →This course refreshes essential operating-system concepts and connects them to concrete examples, Ubuntu-based assignments and research papers. The emphasis is on explaining mechanisms, tracing behaviour and understanding design trade-offs.
Nine instructor-led lectures take place in Weeks 1–6 and 8–10. Week 7 is the midterm; Weeks 11–14 are reserved for student presentations.
| Assessment | Weight |
|---|---|
| Midterm | 30% |
| Final exam | 40% |
| Paper presentation | 15% |
| Assignments | 15% |
Half of the final-exam questions will come from the student paper presentations.
Read the syllabus and assessment details →Nine lecture sets, a midterm and four weeks of paper presentations.
What happens when a program runs?
First half: OS responsibilities; user and kernel modes; interrupts and system calls; programs and processes.
Second half: Process states, context switching, threads, shared resources and basic interprocess communication.
View lecture outline →Read the illustrated reading →Slides (PDF) ↓How should processors be shared, and what changes when deadlines matter?
First half: Multiprogramming; scheduling criteria; FCFS, SJF, round robin and priorities; worked timelines.
Second half: Multicore considerations; starvation; hard and soft real time; deadlines; introductory rate-monotonic and EDF examples.
View lecture outline →Read the illustrated reading →Slides (PDF) ↓How can concurrent activities cooperate without corrupting shared state?
First half: Race conditions, interleavings, critical sections, atomic operations and mutexes.
Second half: Semaphores, condition variables and monitors; producer–consumer and dining philosophers.
View lecture outline →Read the illustrated reading →Slides (PDF) ↓When can processes wait forever, and what can we do about it?
First half: Necessary conditions; resource-allocation and wait-for graphs; deadlock, starvation and livelock.
Second half: Prevention, avoidance, detection and recovery; a safe-state example; practical lock ordering.
View lecture outline →Read the illustrated reading →Slides (PDF) ↓How does a process get its own view of memory?
First half: Address spaces, allocation, fragmentation, segmentation in context and paging.
Second half: Page tables, address-translation exercises, TLBs, multilevel tables and memory protection.
View lecture outline →Read the illustrated reading →Slides (PDF) ↓What happens when the pages a program needs are not in physical memory?
First half: Demand paging, page-fault handling, lazy allocation and copy-on-write.
Second half: Replacement policies, locality, working sets, thrashing and integrated examples.
View lecture outline →Slides and illustrated reading forthcomingNo class this week. The midterm contributes 30% of the course grade. Exact date and coverage will be announced.
How do applications access devices and keep data beyond execution?
First half: Device interaction, interrupts and DMA, buffering and caching, storage characteristics.
Second half: Files, directories, allocation and metadata; persistence; introductory crash consistency and journaling.
View lecture outline →Slides and illustrated reading forthcomingHow can systems share hardware while protecting their boundaries?
First half: Hypervisors, guest and host relationships, CPU and memory virtualization, VMs versus containers.
Second half: Protection boundaries, privileges, permissions, least privilege, isolation failures and resource limits.
View lecture outline →Slides and illustrated reading forthcomingWhat changes when cooperating processes run on different machines?
First half: Messages and RPC, latency, timeouts and partial failure.
Second half: Ordering and coordination; replication and consistency fundamentals; a distributed-storage example and paper-analysis preparation.
View lecture outline →Slides and illustrated reading forthcomingResearch-paper presentations in English, 15 minutes per student. Paper allocations and individual speaking slots will be announced.
Presentation information →Research-paper presentations in English, 15 minutes per student. Paper allocations and individual speaking slots will be announced.
Presentation information →Research-paper presentations in English, 15 minutes per student. Paper allocations and individual speaking slots will be announced.
Presentation information →Research-paper presentations in English, 15 minutes per student. Paper allocations and individual speaking slots will be announced.
Presentation information →