Texyland

Operating Systems and Systems Programming

Topic Checklist

• von Neumann architecture
• Basic C syntax, compiling programs
• Pointers and memory
• Static and global variables, variable scope
• Dynamic memory management in C (malloc and free)
• Strings in C
• File handling in C (FILE, fopen and fclose)
• Sockets
• Concurrent programming
  • Threads
  • rwlock
  • mutex
  • spinlock
• Memory swapping, fragmentation and paging
• Process concept
  • Process states
  • Process Control Block (PCB)
  • Resource sharing between "parent" and "child" processes
  • Process termination (wait vs abort)
• Context switching
• Scheduling processes
• Scheduling queues
• Scheduling criteria (measuring success)
• Scheduling algorithms (FCFS, SJF, PS, MLQS, processor affinity, load balancing)
• The critical-section problem
  • Race conditions
  • Synchronisation primitives
    • Mutual exclusion
    • Progress
    • Bounded waiting
  • Implementing a basic solution in C
  • Semaphores
• File systems
  • Interface exposed by the OS (logical view)
  • How it's structured in memory (physical view)
  • Caching
  • Journaling file systems
• Disk access
  • Steps involved to read/write
  • Disk scheduling algorithms (FCFS, SSTF, SCAN, LOOK)
• Writing kernel programs in C

Please note: this is not an official University-released checklist, so use it as your own discretion.