Instructor: Prashant Shenoy (Office: CMPSCI 336, Ph:
413 577 0850, Email: shenoy@cs.umass.edu)
TA : Vikas Khandelwal (Office LGRC A310, Ph:
413 545 0728 Email: vikas@cs.umass.edu)
Class lectures: MARC 106, TuTh 2:30-3:45
Class Discussions: ELAB 304, We 12:20-1:10
Schedule #: 377451 (lectures), 377458 (dicsussions)
Credits: 4
Office Hours: TuTh 3:45 - 4:45, CMPSCI 336, or by appointment.
TA Office Hours: Th 1-2, Fri 11-12, LGRT 224
This course will provide an introduction to operating system design and implementation. The operating system provides a well-known, convenient, and efficient interface between user programs and the bare hardware of the computer on which they run. The operating system is responsible for allowing resources (e.g., disks, networks, and processors) to be shared, providing common services needed by many different programs (e.g., file service, the ability to start or stop processes, and access to the printer), and protecting individual programs from one another.
The course will start with a brief historical perspective of the evolution of operating systems over the last fifty years, and then cover the major components of most operating systems. This discussion will cover the tradeoffs that can be made between performance and functionality during the design and implementation of an operating system. Particular emphasis will be given to three major OS subsystems: process management (processes, threads, CPU scheduling, synchronization, and deadlock), memory management (segmentation, paging, swapping), file systems, and operating system support for distributed systems.