CISC 361: Operating Systems

Catalog Description:
Principles and techniques employed in the development of operating systems and their control programs. Includes introduction to distributed operating systems, management of memory, processors, I/O devices.

Current Texts:
Operating Systems: Intervals and Design Principles
William Stallings
Prentice-Hall, 4th Edition.

UNIX: The Textbook
Sarwar
Addison Wesley.

Goals:
CISC 361 relays an understanding of the principles and techniques employed in the development of operating systems and the control programs they comprise.

Content:

• Introduction to processes and resources
• Process Management: deadlock, concurrency, mutual exclusion, synchronization, communication
• Processor Management: dispatching, scheduling, virtual processors
• Device Management: I/O, resource allocation, spooling
• Memory Management: paging, segmentation, relocation, fragmentation
• File Management: access methods, security, linking, sharing
• Introduction to distributed operating systems
• Major Project: A subset of the control programs in an operating system will be implemented in a five-phase project, each phase building on the previous ones. The five operating system modules control:
  • Process dispatching
  • Semaphores for process communication
  • Memory allocation
  • Spooling
  • Accounting

Prerequisites:
A minimum grade of C- in both CISC 260 (Machine Organization and Microcomputers).
and CISC 220 (Data Structures)
Recommended Background:
CISC 360 (Computer Architecture)