Free online courseOperating System

Course Description

The course "Operating System" spans 16 hours and 53 minutes of intensive, comprehensive study in the field of Information Technology, focusing particularly on Operational Systems. Highly acclaimed by its audience, this course boasts an impressive average rating of 5 stars out of 5, reflecting the depth and clarity of its content as well as the instructional quality.

Starting with an in-depth introduction to Operating Systems, the course guides learners through the foundational aspects of how computer systems operate and interact with storage and I/O structures. The curriculum prominently covers Computer System Architecture, providing crucial insights into the building blocks of modern computing environments.

As students navigate through this educational journey, they will encounter meticulous explorations of Operating System structures and services. Key topics like user interfaces, system calls, and the various types of these calls are unpacked to elucidate how users and software interact with the OS. This segment is further enriched by detailing system programs and OS design, where learners will gain theoretical and practical knowledge about structures, virtual machines, and system generation, culminating in the system boot process.

Central to any operating system is process management, and this course delves deeply into the mechanics of processes and threads. Topics such as process state, the process control block, and process scheduling are thoroughly covered. Practical operations on processes, including creation, termination, and interprocess communication, are also meticulously discussed. Concepts like shared memory systems, message passing, and sockets are incorporated to provide a rounded understanding of interprocess communication.

The course then transitions into threads, exploring multithreading models, system calls, and threading issues such as fork() and thread cancellation. CPU scheduling is another vital topic, thoroughly dissected through discussions on burst cycles, scheduling criteria, and various scheduling algorithms. Learners are equipped with problem-solving techniques via worked examples on algorithms such as FCFS, SJF, Priority Scheduling, and Round Robin Scheduling, among others.

Next, the intricacies of process synchronization are presented, including the critical-section problem and solutions such as Peterson’s Solution, Test and Set Lock, and semaphores. Real-world problems like the bounded buffer, readers-writers, and dining philosophers problems are solved using monitors, emphasizing both theoretical and practical understanding. The course also provides a series of problem-solving scenarios to further solidify these concepts.

In the latter sections, the discussions pivot to more complex issues like deadlocks, offering resources to understand and address them. Memory management is another critical area, with extensive coverage of both main and virtual memory. The exploration doesn’t stop there; learners are introduced to the fundamentals and implementation techniques of file systems, ensuring they gain a robust understanding of how data is organized, stored, and accessed. The study concludes with a look at mass storage structures, wrapping up the course with a comprehensive overview of the essential components of operating systems.